Introduction to Quilting

In my last post, I introduced myself. I thought it might be fun and interesting to someone, somewhere, sometime, if I made a quick blog post to introduce you to quilting. If you’re curious about quilting and what it is, read on!

So what is quilting, exactly? Technically a quilt is a textile with three layers:

1. The Top: This is what people often think about when they think of a quilt. It is the part of the quilt that usually faces up on the bed. It is often made up of intricately sewn together small pieces of fabric.
2. The middle layer: this is what quilters call the batting. Batting is a soft, fluffy layer of material that provides the thickness and weight of a quilt. It is made of cotton, polyester, wool, bamboo, or other materials, or any combination thereof. Cotton or cotton/poly battings are quite popular.
   • One term you may hear in relation to the batting or the quilt in general is “loft”. This refers to how thick and fluffy the quilt or batting is. Some battings are manufactured to have low loft or be fairly flat, and some are higher loft, or thicker and fluffier. The method and density of quilting will also impact loft, but we’ll get to that in a little bit.
3. The back or backing: This is the backside of the quilt. Often made from one single piece of fabric, it can also be pieced like the front, though usually not as intricately as the front. This is the side that doesn’t show when a quilt is on a bed. 

These 3 layers are stitched together, often with sewing (though there are other methods) called quilting. Which brings us to the definition of quilting. Quilting is, technically, the process of stitching together 2 or more layers of fabric to create a thicker, padded textile not-so-coincidentally called a quilt. Funny how that works lol. For quilters, though, “quilting” can refer to any part of the process of creating a quilt, or the whole process altogether. 

I want to take a moment here to talk about the difference between “quilting” and “piecing”. While quilting is technically the term for sewing the layers of a quilt together, piecing is the term for sewing the little bits of fabric together to create the quilt top. I’m going to talk about different methods of piecing later. 

So that’s it. That’s what quilting is. Simple, right? Well… technically it can be! If you took two large pieces of fabric and a layer of batting, and quilted them together, you’ve technically done quilting, and you’ve technically made a quilt. The rest is just details, but they do say the devil is in the details! But to start out, let me assure you that you don’t have to, nor in my opinion, should you, make the most complicated quilt pattern ever. I’m a firm believer that new and beginner quilters should start with a pretty, simple pattern, to practice some of the skills you need to make your quilting experience successful and rewarding. I’ll get to some suggestions in a later post. First, lets talk briefly about the history of quilting.

Brief history of quilting

Did you know that quilting – the process of stitching together multiple layers of fabric with a padding in the middle – may date back as far as 3400 BCE? That’s a heck of a long textile history!!! Though for much of it’s history, quilting served a practical purpose – protection and insulation – there have been decorative elements for centuries. Despite the 4-½ millennium history of quilting, the oldest surviving quilted textile dates from between 100 BCE to 200 CE. It was found in a cave in Mongolia and now lives in the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. 

Many people are more familiar with quilts and quilting dating from more recently, including the quilt circles of Colonial women in the United States, the Amish quilts dating from the mid 1800s, and the Gees Bend quilts dating back to the nineteenth century. Whole books could, and probably have been written about the entire history of quilting, but I’m not honestly that much of a historian. I mostly wanted to give you an idea about how long quilting has been around – almost 5,000 years!!! – especially the decorative styles that we’re used to today that are descended from the quilts our ancestors made a couple or several centuries ago. 

Quilting styles

Today, there are many, many styles of quilts – I’m specifically talking about how the top is pieced right now. Here’s a quick handful of methods or styles:

1. Patchwork quilting: In this method, fabric is cut into pieces according to a pattern, and then sewn back together, usually with a quarter inch seam allowance, to form designs that range from very simple, as in squares sewn together in a simple grid, to very complicated as can be seen in many modern designers’ quilt patterns. The stitching that holds the pieces of the quilt top is hidden on the back of the quilt in this method. Frequently, patchwork is done in squares, called blocks, that are then sewn together into rows and then the whole quilt top. If you see a quilt with repeating patterns in a grid layout, it’s probably made with blocks. 
2. Applique: In this style, the pieces are cut out, often from some sort of template, and then are sewn onto the front of another piece of fabric. The stitches that hold the pieces together can be shown as with raw edge applique, or be mostly hidden as with needle turn applique, but the main idea of applique is that one piece of fabric is sewn onto the top of another. Applique can frequently be done in a block style like patchwork, though it doesn’t have to be.
3. English Paper Piecing: In this method of quilting (also known as EPP), pieces of fabric are wrapped around paper or cardboard or even plastic templates (sometimes called “papers”), and then those fabric wrapped papers are butted up against each other and sewn by hand together at the seam area. Once a piece is completely sewn around with other pieces, that paper can be pulled from the back and often is reused. This method is often very geometric with repeating geometric patterns and shapes including hexagons, diamonds and triangles.
4. Foundation Paper Piecing: In this method (also known as FPP), a pattern is drawn or printed out on a piece of paper. The fabric is laid over the paper, and stitched down on the printed lines. In this style, you sew through the paper, sewing the fabric pieces together in the process, and then rip the papers out at the end. One interesting aspect of this is that the pattern is printed on the paper backwards and then the way the fabric is sewn together mirrors that so that the finished piece is correct. FPP can create beautifully sharp points, better than traditional patchwork piecing can. 
5. Wholecloth quilting: In this method of quilting, the quilt top is not pieced together, it is one whole piece of cloth (or maybe a couple of pieces). In this method, it is the actual quilting that takes center stage. Commercially made quilts are often whole cloth quilts because it is very expensive to try to commercially produce a pieced quilt. Despite this, handmade whole cloth quilts can be absolutely stunning, with intricately beautiful quilting stitches and/or multiple beautiful colors of quilting thread. 

When it comes to the actual quilting, there are also many different ways and styles. A few common ones are:

1. Straight line quilting: the quilting is done in straight lines down or across the quilt. They can be densely or loosely spaced. This is a fairly popular quilting method among quilters who do their own quilting on their domestic machine, as it’s relatively easy. A fun riff on straight line quilting is to use the wavy or serpentine decorative stitch on your machine. You still move the quilt through in a straight line, but the result is a wavy line. 
2. Stitch in the ditch: This is another popular quilting method of quilting for home quilters. In this method, you stitch right next to the seam lines of the piecing. Because the seam allowance is often pressed to one side or the other in quilting, stitching in the ditch sews just right next to the seam line on the side the seam allowance was pressed away from, so that the stitches fall right next to the fold of the fabric on the front. In this way, the quilting almost disappears into the pieced design of the quilt. 
3. Free motion: In this method of quilting, the quilter does what they want. They can either make fancy designs, or random squiggles called meandering, or hearts or circles or whatever the quilter can come up with. In free motion quilting, you’re not going only in one direction as with straight line quilting, nor are you following the seams of the piecing as with stitch in the ditch. Because you want to be able to move your quilt as you like for free motion quilting, frequently the presser foot is removed and a special free motion, or darning, foot is installed. At the same time the feed dogs on under the quilt are lowered so that they don’t try to push the quilt. The entire motion of the quilting comes from the quilter moving the quilt around under the foot while sewing. 
4. Longarm: Longarm quilting is done on a special sewing machine specifically designed for the purpose. The quilt is loaded onto a large frame that supports it, and the longarm sewing machine goes around this frame and moves side to side within the frame to quilt the quilt. Someone who has a longarm sewing machine and does longarm quilter is called a longarmer or longarm quilter. You can of course longarm your own quilts if you own a longarm machine, but most frequently it is a paid service and quilters send their quilts off to be longarmed by someone else. Longarming can be either freehand, or using special rulers, or it can be a computer design, or panto, that allows the machine to just kind of run on its own without the longarmer having to manually guide the machine. 

Okay, so that’s quilting in a (gigantic) nutshell lol. I should’ve maybe mentioned at the beginning that I don’t condense information very well…  This is as brief an overview of quilting as I can manage, and I hope it explains some terms you may have run across in your research or preparation for quilting. 

I promise that, despite the excessive information in this post, you, yes YOU, absolutely CAN quilt! There are process and methods, but they are easy to learn and you don’t have to do anything too terribly complicated. Start simple, learn the techniques and methods, and then get fancy later. I promise you can do this, and I’m here to help! 

Was any of this helpful or interesting? Did anything surprise you? Did I get anything wrong or leave anything super important out? Leave me a comment below and lets talk about it!