What I Learned Making a Quilt, as a Garment Sewist

Lets face it, garment sewing and quilt sewing are different. One is not better than the other just different. I mainly sew garments, some bags and try not to sew quilts. I always find them to be a long, tedious process… however, over the years, I have made 6 quilts, and apparently will be making yet another one with my daughter, now that she has seen the one below. Le sigh. It’s good for you, though, I got some lessons learned for you along with some tools that are helpful to have, if you want to delve into quilt making.

Quilting Tools

• Rotary cutter and mat (optional but highly recommended) – helps with cutting precisely
• Drop feed sewing machine – this is needed to do free motion quilting
• Quarter inch presser foot for piecing (see below in the lessons learned)
• Darning presser foot for free motion quilting

• Cotton or wool quilt batting
  I recommend cotton or wool to get that puckering look after the batting shrinks in the wash. I found this article that talks about all types of batting here.
• Pins
  They help keep the quilt sandwich (bottom, batting and top of the quilt) all together. There are various types of pins that are great depending on your preference. There are the Magic pins that are long, extra fine and have a nice grip to help put the pins in. And there are curved safety pins that prevent you from getting poked when you are doing the quilting part.
  
  To be honest, I just used my straight pins that were thicker because I didn’t want my fine pins to bend out of shape. Also, it was too much effort to use the curved safety pins I have.

Quilting Lessons

Pick a pattern that is simple for your first quilt

Quilts can be intimidating if you haven’t made one before. Start with a simple pattern like this one or this one. Less to line up and with bigger pieces, it will complete faster too.

Take the time to cut is important

Because quilt designs hinge on coming together in a certain way – corners matching up; triangles having points, etc – cutting your fabric just right will go a long way in helping match everything up.

Quarter inch foot is your friend

If you sew garments- most of the seam allowances are ⅜ or ⅝ of an inch but not for quilts. Quilts usually have ¼ inch seam allowances and can be easily measured up with the quarter inch foot. Lining up your pieces to the foot is much easier than trying to line it up with the seam guides on throat plate.

Piecing makes it go faster

With garment sewing, you really don’t have many seams to sew – side seam, neck, center back if there is shaping, sleeves and hems.

But with quilts, you are essentially making a huge piece of fabric from little squares, rectangles, or whatever shape you have. So there are a LOT of seams to sew. The fastest way to sew them is piecing. You feed one seam after another through your machine, creating a long line of fabrics sewn together. You can use thread snips or a standing cutter to cut the threads in between each piece. I happened to buy a threader that has such a cutter – and it was much faster than using snips.

Perfection is not a requirement

Last but not least – it doesn’t have to be perfect to be loved! It takes hours to make a quilt, from cutting, piecing, ironing, quilting, and binding and it will keep you warm and cozy whether or not the squares line up or not. So don’t fret when things don’t work. And practice makes perfect, so while your first one doesn’t line up, your next ones will. As you can see in the picture below, the top intersection points match up, but the bottom intersection doesn’t.

quilt design

Now, let’s talk about this quilt.. I started this, embarrassingly, about 5 years ago. It is a long overdue quilt for a friend’s kid; lucky for me this is big enough for her kid still. I did not know about quilt patterns at the time and just kinda winged it. I had an idea of what I wanted to do – an applique scene with owls in the center and rectangles around it.

The original plan was to have the rectangles go diagonally, but I ended up scrapping that because it was too much work to figure out. Sometimes, done is better than what you have planned.

The back was literally me cutting large rectangles and working out how to piece them together to the same size (actually just a little bigger) than the front. I was running out of fabric and had to add those brown pieces to compensate.

For the middle applique scene with the border frame – I ironed the edges under and sewed it on top of the rectangles and cut away the excess underneath, because again, I couldn’t figure out how to do corners with what I had. 

For the binding, I didn’t have enough of one fabric so I connected strips of all the fabrics and made it into binding.

So as you can see, it was not perfect, or exactly what I planned but it came out beautifully.

The fabric

I’m pretty sure these fabrics are from Joann Fabrics. All quilting cotton – I tried to keep the fabrics in the cream, teal, gold color scheme to make it all cohesive no matter how I designed it.

Have you tried quilting? If not, did these tips help? Let me know if you have other questions in the comments.

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