Making a fast and easy permanent label for your quilt

Yesterday on QUILTsocial I showed you how to sew a flanged binding on your quilt and I finished up my art quilt. I just love how Northcott’s Stonehenge Elements fabrics look in my quilt AND how professional the “fake piping” looks on the binding.

Today I had planned to talk about different ways to hang quilts BUT I came up with a different idea instead. …OK – it’s confession time – I have to admit that I HATE putting labels on my quilts. Don’t get me wrong, I think quilts SHOULD have labels, but there’s something in the process of label making that makes me cringe. I have made hundreds of quilts and only a small fraction of them have labels. I know, it’s criminal. But that’s all about to change because I now have a better solution and today I’m going to share with you how to make a fast and easy permanent label for your quilt.

Different ways to label your quilt

There are lots of different ways to label your quilts. You can make a beautiful hand stitched label like Carla did in her QUILTsocial blog post in July or you can use a pre-made label that you have custom embroidered. You can write your info on a square of fabric or you can use specially made fabric sheets for your printer and create something amazing on your computer. You can hand stitch your label to the back of your quilt or you can use some type of adhesive to stick it on.

I’ve used all of these methods at one time or another, but I haven’t found one that I REALLY liked. I often think, after quilting my quilt, that I should have made a label and sewed it to my backing BEFORE I quilted it so that it would be a permanent piece of the quilt. But of course I never think of it at the right time – I’m usually so excited to get to the quilting that I don’t take time to think about labels!

My new favorite way to label a quilt

I came up with this label method after seeing something similar done with a ribbon as a label. I wanted the label to have some substance, so I decided to layer the fabric with some of my fusible interfacing. I cut one 8″ square of my Stonehenge Elements fabric and one of the interfacing the same size. You could make this square as big or as little as you wanted depending on the size of the quilt and how much information you want to write on it.

I then ironed the interfacing to the back of the Stonehenge Elements fabric and then folded the fabric in half diagonally to make a large triangle.

The next step is to topstitch along to folded edge of the triangle. This will ensure that the edge remains nice and crisp and that the interfacing stays in place. After this, you use an erasable fabric marker such as an Heirloom Fast Fade Erasable Fabric Marker or a Frixion pen to mark lines across the label that are parallel to the folded edge.

I then used a permanent fine tipped fabric marker to write all of my information onto the labels using the lines as a guide. After this step following your erasable pen manufacturers information to remove the guidelines.

The label is then pinned to the BACK of the quilt in one corner so that the raw edges of the label align with the raw edges of the quilt.

You then sew on your binding using whatever method you prefer. Since we used the flanged binding method yesterday to finish off my art quilt, you can see the stitching on the back of the quilt (and the label) along the edge of the binding. If you preferred to hand stitch your binding you wouldn’t have this stitching showing on the back.

This type of label is easy to make and really HARD to remove!! That’s an important feature if you’re displaying quilts in public places or loaning them out to shops or shows like I do. I think I’ll be using this method from now on to label all of my quilts! Now that you know how to make a fast and easy permanent label for your quilt I hope that you’ll be inspired to label all of your quilts too!