So You Want to Make a Quilt (part 1)

 I made my first quilt during my law school winter break on my mom's sewing machine. I wanted to learn how to sew Cutting up three polyester skirts into squares and sewing the squares back together seemed like a good way to learn. This is my first quilt, born in December 1997.

I've made four more quilts since then. I am not an expert. Making quilts is very easy and very gratifying, however, so I thought I would demystify the process and offer some tips on how to make a quilt.

You will need a sewing machine if you want to finish a quilt in a reasonable time frame. You will need fabric, but it can be from anything: clothing, sheets, fabric scraps you found at a garage sale or fabric store. Gee's Bend quilters used everything they had on hand. I recommend that you get a "self-healing" cutting mat and a rotor cutter to cut the fabric, as well as fabric shears. You'll need a spool of thread, obviously. You will need an iron. Three-quarters of the way through your project, you will need batting, which is the stuff inside the quilt, but worry about that later. 

My current project was inspired by this print by Woody DeOthello that we got at Paulson Fontaine Press. Not a great picture because it's still in plastic. 

Here are the steps I take to make a quilt. 

1. Sort fabric into three groups: bold colors, muted colors, and dark colors. You can obviously use different categories but you want to make sure the colors are all in the same kind of family. Unless you want to make a totally discordant quilt, which is fine too.

2. Pick a pattern. The current one I am working on is a log cabin quilt. Each block will look like this, and I decided to use my "bold" fabrics. The easiest pattern for a first-time quilter is just simple blocks, like the one above.

3. Iron the fabric. You are going to do a lot of ironing but it's worth it to make a nicer and less frustrating quilt.

4. Figure out how many blocks you want to make and then figure out the number of pieces you will need to cut. Here are my calculations for 30 blocks. I ended up cutting by half an inch more on each piece so I could have 1/4 inch seams.

5. Start cutting your pieces. I strongly recommend that you cut all the pieces before you begin sewing. Cutting the 420 pieces I needed for this quilt only took a few hours over a couple of days. I cut more than one piece at a time by layering the fabric. It goes very quickly that way.

6. Once you have cut all the pieces, you start pairing them up. In theory, you could plan the whole quilt, but that's not the way I do it, usually. For the log cabin quilt, I paired my 1s and 2s, which form the inner part of the block, and after I'd sewn those together, I added the 3s and sewed again. Add, sew, add, sew. This picture was taken when I was in the process of adding the 7 pieces. 

7. When I am sewing, I do not cut the pieces apart as I am sewing, I just chain them together. It goes much more quickly that way. Sew them all at the same time, and cut the blocks apart when you are finished.

8. Every time you finish adding new pieces to your block, you need to iron them again so that the seams lay flat. Some people iron the seams all resting in one direction. In this quilt, I am ironing the seams open (so they look like a magazine held open) so it will be very flat. 

I am about to add the number 9 pieces, so I will do the second half of this little tutorial when I am further along in my process.