How to Use Cuddle® Minky Fabric on a Cotton Quilt with Shannon Fabrics

Hey everybody, good morning. Welcome to Sew Together Tuesday. I'm Teresa Coates and I'm the national educator for Shannon Fabrics. I'm really happy to be here.

Today we're gonna be working on cotton in cuddle. Today we're gonna be
combining the two substrates. For those of you who are quilters and been interested in backing your quilts with cuddle, I'm going to show you some tips today on how to do that.

For our project today we're just working with a little quilt block that I made. I'm using the Cassandra fabric collection from Robert Kaufman Fabrics with their Casandra's Favorite quilt pattern (it's a downloadable
pattern) that I got and then I used this one to just do a little practice run.

So I've got
my quilt block
My quilters dream poly batting
a cuddle back
my 505 spray
my stretch needles from Schmetz
my stiletto
Para Cotton Poly from Quilters Select (it's a really nice thin polyester thread)
My firm Mori scissors
my Olfa cutter for when I'm doing the luxe cuddles
my rotary cutter for when I'm doing the regular cuddles
My favorite flower head pins

Today we're gonna be putting this block together and I'm going to show you some tips on how to do that. It's really actually super duper easy.

One of the things that I want to make sure that you know is that using Cuddle minky is going to be different than using minky that you found elsewhere so make sure that you're using the Cuddle brand. It works much
better and has some things about it that make it better for working with for a quilt back - one of them is it's got a really nice pile to it so it's gonna be really beautiful but it also only has a two-way stretch so using something that has a four-way stretch will be harder.

Today I'm going to show you how to do it on a domestic machine but it's absolutely doable on a long arm and I'll show you an example of that later. Let's get started.

First I'm going to put these three layers together. What I want to
do is I want to adhere these three together so that they will work as one
piece and I can quilt them.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to put this piece of fabric down (this is just a scrap piece of fabric that I have, just some cotton and I'm gonna use that as my like overspray). You want to make sure that you have a place that you can spray and not get it all over the place.

I’m gonna spray the back of this with my spray and then I'm gonna push this out and I'm gonna get my middle nice and flat and I'm just gonna sort of work it out so that it's flat it's stuck to the batting. Make sure that it's it's gonna be flat on there - that's really important.

I'm just gonna get that nice and taut okay so now it's stuck these two are working as one piece and so now I'm gonna put the cuddle on there. I'm just gonna turn it over and I'm gonna do the same thing and try to get those lined up so if you were working with a large quilt obviously you would do this a little bit differently but not much. If you have a way of working with it because you've done bigger quilts with it I'd love to hear your techniques - leave me a comment and let me know what you do!
Now I've got these all stuck together. If I were doing if I were doing a larger quilt I would put pins in this. I'm just gonna put some of my clover pins in here.

Now I would take this to my machine and I would quilt it. I'm going to show you just a little bit of it because it's really the same thing as you would do one to any other but I'll show you how well it works.

I've got my machine set up and I'm at a three and a half stitch length I've got my walking foot on there and I'm just using a straight stitch. I'm just
gonna do a little stitch in the ditch here just inside of there. I'm just gonna use my walking foot, stitch right along so you have this. You know the fun little gloves that you can use? They'll totally work for this too.

I'm just gonna do this little square show you what I'm doing. I'm just letting the side of my foot there, right next to the next to the seam so it's not exactly a stitch in the ditch it's more like an echo quilting. It's not any harder than regular quilting. I like to do things where I just follow the lines because
I'm a beginning quilter.

It will leave little lines you can see - I can just rub them out from the feed dogs that are going through here.

Let me show you the other one that I did that's the whole pattern of that. I put the binding on part of it. I'm gonna talk you through this.

Here's the quilt that I did I did four blocks of it and I quilted it all with
the cuddle on the back. This is Cuddle 3 in Tomato which turned out really
beautiful and you can see that it just pops up these designs so nicely.

So one of the things that's different with working between cotton and Cuddle quilts is that in the Cuddle quilts we give you a half inch seam allowance for all of our quilts and with a cotton quilt you always use a
quarter inch seam allowance so we sort of have to adjust for that on the
binding. What I do is I just cut it off a little bit bigger. I just cut it a quarter inch larger than I normally would.