Welcome to Precious Tyes

I have many passions in life and one of them is quilting. The others are reading, knitting,
crochet, cross stitching exercise and being a mom which are all precious tyes to me.
This blog will be about all of these things but mainly about quilting and how it is tied into my life.
The above wall hanging was designed by me and published into a pattern called Homespun Memories.

My blog is also about my Nifty Fifty Quilting swaps which are 50 state quilt block swaps that I started organizing over 10 years ago when my husband was going through depression. It helped me through a very difficult time. We have swapped over 70,000 quilt blocks during this time with many stories that traveled across the country along with our state quilt blocks. Our groups also make charity quilts for Breast Cancer Awareness.

Saturday, December 11, 2010



Hanging a Quilt on a Quilt Rack

I am always frustrated when I have to hang my large quilts on my quilt racks.  I can never seem to fold them just right so they lay properly.  I just took two of my quilts off their quilt racks to hang up my mother-in-law’s two Christmas quilts.   This is the first Christmas without my mother-in-law Joy.  Sadly she lost her fight with ALS this past March.  I have chosen to place her Christmas quilts on the racks this season so my kids can appreciate their beauty instead of them being folded up on the fireplace.
My mother-in-laws other Christmas quilt
Joy and I took our first quilting class together 21 years ago.  We spent many hours sharing fabrics, designs and quilting books.  We took three hand piecing and quilting classes together.  Over the years I have continued doing hand piecing and quilting but have moved to machine work since I have so many projects to complete.  Even though Joy was an avid sewer her whole life she only quilted by hand…she never once in 20 years did any of her quilting by machine.  Here are the quilts on the rack and some hints on hanging such large quilts on a quilt rack.

This how the quilt looked the first time I tried hanging it on the rack..... I was frustrated that it was not hanging nicely. 

So I took it off and measured my quilt rack across the top which was 28 ½ inches.  I decided I wanted 26 inches of the quilt showing on the rack.  I then laid the quilt face down on the floor and measured 13” out from  each side of the center. Then I neatly folded each side in so it measured 26”.  

I made sure that it was laying very flat and even. My cat Joey inspected my job.   

 I did make sure that the ends of the quilt at the bottom were very even.  I did not pay much attention to the top ends as they would not be showing once the quilt was on the rack.   

Then this is where it always got tricky for me.  In the past as I would lift the quilt up, it would bunch up and look awful on the rack. This time I decided to fold the quilt again so it was half the size. Then I gently picked up the quilt keeping all the layers held tightly together and I laid it over the quilt rack and it stayed neatly folded.  Finally the quilt was nice and neat over the rack.

Front view of the quilt on the rack after folding it properly


The quilt also laid very nicely over the back.




1 comment:

  1. Pretty clever calculations. I like your racks and how you put some at he bottom of your page from Amazon!

    ReplyDelete