Pressing Matters

Open or to the side, that is the question…

Quilters are a pretty kind and accepting bunch, from what I’ve experienced. And there are almost as many different styles of piecing, use of color and pattern, quilting, binding, etc. as there are quilters. It’s a diverse community that supports and celebrates its differences.

However, I’ve noticed there is at least one part of quilting that many quilters feel that there is a right way and a wrong way to do, and that is pressing. Pressing is a huge part of quilting. A great pressing job can really make a quilt block come to life, and a poor job can detract from the beauty of a quilt and cause unsightly bumps and ridges.

So I thought I’d jump in with my two cents about how I like to press my quilt blocks and why. So…I’m a seams open presser. I know that places me in the minority of quilters, but I really feel like it makes my quilts smoother and neater.

When I started seriously quilting a couple years ago, I pressed my seams to the side and nesting them whenever possible, because that seamed like how it was supposed to be done. I even wrote my first pattern that way. A perfectly nested seam is so satisfying, right? But I found I was having trouble in places where more than four corners met, or where I was working with shapes that didn’t have right angles. I ended up with way too much fabric on one side of the seam or the other, creating a big hard bump in my quilt top.

Also, I found I sometimes had a hard time getting simple seams to lie perfectly flat on the front of the quilt, because one side of the seam was folded back and the other wasn’t and this created a ridge and sometimes the folded side tended to roll over the seam.

I decided to try pressing my seams open, and I loved the results. The fullness from the seam allowances is distributed evenly on both sides of the seam, so my quilt tops are so much smoother, even in places where lots of points come together, like the center of this star. And seams lie perfectly flat, because both sides of the seam are folded back on themselves in the same way and the tension on the seam is equal.

I might choose to press my seams to the side instead of open if I were sewing with a very light or see-through fabric, so I could press my seams toward the darker fabric and not have anything show through the lighter side. Other than that, I think I’ll stick to pressing open. Call me a rebel.