Quilt in a Day Forums

I have to tell you that I am just thrilled that I discovered how to use pigtails. I'm doing a project with lots of piecing of triangles to the corners of 12" blocks. Before, I had to pull out enough top thread and bobbin thread to pull behind the presser foot, hang on to it so it wouldn't ball up. Then when you stop sewing you have to pull the piece out long enough to leave thread tails to pull out again, plus cut the thread tails off the project. What a pain and waste of thread when you have a gazillion to do. Then I saw this on QNN.

Take two 1" x 1" scraps, fold each in half. Start sewing on one of the pigtails, sew off the pigtail for 1/4" to twist the thread, then insert your piecing project. Sew to the end of the project, sew about 1/4" off the project to form the twist again, then sew onto the second pigtail, leaving the needle down at the end of the pigtail. When done, don't pull the project out, just swing it around to the front, clip close to the second pigtail, then clip the first pigtail off to get it ready for the next piece. Swing the pigtail left in the machine behind the needle and you are ready to sew the twisted part and insert another project piece, no pulling thread, no jammed thread and no waste. You can use the same two pigtails over and over until you are finished with that portion of the project.

??? guess I need to try this to make sense of it. I do agree that there is a huge waste of thread sewing triangles

I've heard them called 'spiders' and 'thread bunnies'.

Here's a link to another explaination.
http://www.quiltville.com/leadersenders ... ders.shtml

Bonnie at Quiltville.com takes it a step futher and instead of using the same fabric over and over, she sews together 2" squares to use in other quilts. I've started doing this and made my great niece a baby quilt, have sew squares together for a 4-patch quilt and I'm now using 2 1/2" squares to make 'Chicklets' another scrapy quilt using squares.

Wow!! Thanks for the new idea and site. I was very inspired by Bonnie's scrap quilts and now will not even waste the scraps.....never mind the thread!!!

okay I get it now what a good idea

I do that, too, knitnoid. I've made a king-sized quilt, front and back, using this method. I've started another.

I've always used the little bits, but never the squares. After what Knitnoid and Leetec said, I think I'm going to star doing that.

So you have a whole bunch of 2" squares handy and every time you start stitching a string of pieces, you sew two of the squares together? And then snip them off later and put them away for another quilt?

What piece or part is the pig tail?

The pigtails were the starting and ending pieces that I used over and over. Now if you are going to sew two squares together, they would be your starting and ending pieces, but you would do two new ones each time you started and ended sewing, until you had enough connected for a scrap quilt. No pigtails needed.

Got it!