If you're piecing a quilt one unit at a time — sew, cut the threads, lift the foot, start again — you're spending most of your time on everything except sewing. Chain piecing fixes that, and it's one of the first techniques worth learning once you've made a block or two.
In this tutorial, Heidi breaks down what chain piecing is and why it works: you feed your pairs through the machine one after another in a single continuous run, without stopping or cutting between them. You end up with a chain of sewn units joined by short threads, ready to be clipped apart.
What you'll learn
- What chain piecing is and how the technique works
- Why sewing in one continuous chain saves time
- How it cuts down on thread waste
- Why your fabric units stay organised instead of getting mixed up
Why it saves more thread than you'd think
Every time you start and stop a seam you pull a tail of thread from both spool and bobbin. Across a few hundred units on a full quilt, those tails add up to a meaningful amount of thread — and a meaningful number of stops. Chain piecing replaces all of that with one short jump between units.
It also keeps your pieces in order
The organisational benefit is the one people underestimate. Because the units come off the machine in the order you fed them, a chain is a physical record of your layout. Feed them in row order and they stay in row order, which matters a great deal on a block with a lot of similar-looking pieces.
Where to go next
Separating the chain afterwards is its own small chore — our tutorial on cutting chain piecing threads faster covers a quicker method than snipping each one with scissors.
For accurate piecing seams, see our Janome Edge Guide Foot tutorial, and for thread choice, Quilting Thread Weights Explained. Piecing thread is in our quilting thread collection, and quilting supplies has the rest of the essentials.