Someone asked on Facebook about how Linda and I fix our quilts to the wall. Here’s a quick guide:

Usually when we make a quilt we opt for an invisible sleeve on the reverse of the work. Basically this is just a tube of fabric. Ideally use the same fabric as you have done for the backing of the quilt and it’ll look really neat.

Quilt shows often use really chunky battens to suspend quilts from, especially if they use quilt frames rather than hang against walls. To accommodate this you need to make sure the sleeve is plenty big enough. If it’s not, then you’ll get a bulge on the front of the quilt which is not particularly attractive! Even for small quilts I’m in the habit of making the sleeve very generous so I’ll usually cut it 9″ deep by the width of the quilt. (Finished depth of sleeve will then be in the region of 4.5″).

I turn the side edges under and top stitch to hide the raw edges. This also serves to shorten the width of the sleeve so it’ll be short by about an inch or so at each end which is a good thing!

Press the sleeve with the long edges aligned.

I add the sleeve before the binding. I pin it in place to the back of the quilt lining up the raw edges of the sleeve with the raw top edge of the quilt. Sew along taking a scant seam allowance to secure it in place. Then I add the binding taking the proper seam allowance. The sleeve will be stitched twice making sure it’s not going anywhere!

The sleeve and binding are both hand finished and I blind hem stitch the binding down then the sleeve. The important bit is to roll up the sleeve slightly, make a new crease and then hem along that line. This’ll make the sleeve D-shaped in profile which is going to accommodate the batten. I finish off by hemming the back of the two short sides of the sleeve to the quilt just to make sure that the batten always slides through the sleeve rather than slipping between the sleeve and the backing.

The battens we use when fixing to a wall are flat and you can get them in any diy store. We cut them to length, just short of the width of the quilt and then drill a hole at each end. The batten can then be slid into the sleeve, and because the sleeve is shorter than the quilt you can just bend the corner of the quilt back and screw through the hole into the wall. This is pretty secure and dead easy to do.

Hope this is useful.
Thanks for stopping by,
Laura
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