We persuaded Katrina to give away 10 of her Top Tips for perfect patchwork piecing. These tips are going to help you to be more accurate with your patchwork and get better results.

1. Use Best Press

Simply spraying a little light starch onto your fabric before you cut makes it easier for you to cut your fabric as the spray temporarily, lightly, hardens the material making it easier to handle.

2. Check Your Blade

When using a Rotary Cutter, always make sure that you've got a nice sharp blade and that your blade hasn't got any little nicks in it.

For example, if you have previously gone over a pin, it's always worth making sure that you've not damaged the blade.

3. Always use a Ruler

Always use a ruler to measure and cut - not the mat. It's going to give you a much more accurate cut because the ruler helps to hold the fabric in place.

4. Check your needle

You need the right needle for the right job and this will help you to be more accurate.

If you have a bigger needle going into your fabric it's going to make your seam fractionally bigger. So it's really important to have the right size needle to keep your seams as accurate and as near to the quarter inch as possible.

5. Use the right thread

To keep your seams nice and accurate, at a quarter of an inch, you need the right weight thread. It should be a cotton thread and no more than 50 weight. 60 weight is perfect because it's a nice thin thread but strong enough to hold your pieces together.

If you use a polyester thread when you're sewing cotton you won't get such good results and if your thread is too thick then it will affect the width of your seams.

6. Use a ¼" Foot

You need a quarter of an inch foot to help keep your seams at a quarter of an inch.

Katrina's favourite foot for quilting is the one with the guide so that the fabric is kept within that line and therefore you can't go over a quarter of an inch or under a quarter of an inch.

7. Sit Up Straight

Sit up straight at your sewing machine.

If you sit sideways, you may not be as accurate and unable to watch the guide go down the edge of your fabric. You're not going to get the best results.

It also helps with your posture so if you're doing a lot of sewing, you're not going to end up with a backache at the end of the day.

8. Wind two bobbins

This is one of Katrina's favourite tips.

Wind two bobbins.

When you run out of thread part way through a project, you need to wind another bobbin and have take your top thread off. If you have a second bobbin ready to go, you easily change them other.

9. Set your seams

It’s all about how you press your fabric. We want to set our seams to help with accuracy because if we just press without setting the seams, we can have some stretch in our fabric.

Press along the line that you've just sewn to set the seam and then press all the seams flat in one direction.

10. Pin from the middle

When you're going to join one row to the next, to help with your accuracy - start pinning from the center and work your way out. If you do not start from the middle, your joins wont match up with each other.

Do you have any other TOP TIPS for quilting? Comment below. 👇🏼