Quilting leather tutorial

Quilted leather is a great technique to step up your fashion sewing projects and add a rock & roll edge. Whether you make a full project with this technique, or just add touches of it to a project, it looks really cool.

Below are some projects I pulled from the web to illustrate how you can incorporate quilted leather or vinyl into your fashion sewing.

An extreme example of leather quilting from the 2009 Balmain collection.

Quilting on pants from Michelle's final collection on the season's Project Runway.

from Burberry....
Are you convinced that quilted leather is a great way to add some  flavor to your wardrobe?
But how to do it?
Here is my method.......

Two layers of batting gives a nice puffy look, but use only one if you want only a little dimension. To do two layers iron on one layer to the leather, then iron on the second layer on top of the first layer.

Quilt your grid along the lines you drew on the wrong side of the leather. I would advise you to trim each line as you go. Some of my threads got caught in my quilting lines and I had to pull them out and trim them, which was time consuming.

Here are a few things I discovered when trying to figure out how to quilt leather:

Two layers of fusible batting gave a nice padded look. 

Don't try to use spray adhesive on normal batting. Everything will get gummed up, including your needle. Yuck!

Don't just try to pin on normal batting either... It will shift around when you are trying to quilt the lines. I tried that too..

Make sure you cut your strings after sewing each line. Or else the loose strings will get caught in your quilting lines. can you see this happening above? Practice makes perfect! ( That's why I did this project in vinyl and not the awesome chartreuse leather i have been saving...)

You WILL need to line your quilted leather. The batting will feel all scratchy next to your skin if you don't !