Beginner Quilting Session 1: Overview and Supplies

Quilting has been around for many hundreds of years. And it's the process of sewing together layers of fabric with a layer of batting or padding in between. Now, before we look at what's quilting is today, let's take a quick look at what quilting used to be in the past. Quilting has been a popular needlework tradition in Europe since about the fist century. Around the 14th century quilting in clothing really started to become popular.

In France, in Italy they were wearing quilted gambeson underneath their armor for an extra layer of protection. During American colonial days, paper quilting started to become popular. And that's the process of actually using paper or paper pattern in your quilting. Back then paper was a little more scarce of a commodity so people would save old letters, they'd use catalogs sometimes even newspaper in their quilts and sometimes they'd even leave that newspaper or paper in place as an extra layer of insulation. Around the 20th century art quilting started to become popular.

So rather than making a quilt, that is for a bed or for any sort of warmth, people were making smaller decorative quilts to be displayed on tables or hung on walls. Today we have a little bit of everything. Now, while back in the day, a lot of those quilts used to be made entirely by hand, today we have a lot of tools and things that really help make our job a little bit easier. Now, while we may not still be leaving old newspaper in our quilts, we are still doing forms of paper piecing, we're still using quilting and clothing and we're still making quilts that can be displayed anywhere. Now, my goal with this class is to teach you the basics of quilting.

Whether you have a background in sewing or you've never even turned on a machine, I'm going to show you everything you need to know to be able to quilt. We're going to talk about some of the supplies you'll need. I'm gonna talk to you about how you properly cut your fabric how you choose your fabric, how you piece it together, I can properly press it. Then of course we're going to talk about some batting, some backing fabric, how we're going to layer that all together and then of course, we're going to do some quilting. And then last we are going to bind and finish off our project.

And just like that you'll have a new skill that you can build upon. So first let's talk a little bit about some of the supplies you're going to need. Of course, we're going to need a sewing machine. Now this doesn't have to be a special machine for quilting, this can just be a standard sewing machine. And the sewing machine that I have here I do have an extra plate attachment like this, that I can add onto it.

So this just makes my surface a little bit bigger and easier for when I'm sewing. This is not necessary, but if it's something that you have the option to get with your machine, it's really quite handy to have. So of course you gonna have our sewing machine and then we need to have some fabric. And a little later on we're gonna talk about all the different kinds of fabric out there, different ways to buy fabric but you just want to get some cotton fabric and that's a good place to start, when it comes to learning how to quilt. We're also going to need batting.

This is gonna be the center layer of our quilts. Batting comes in a variety of sizes and different materials. We have some polyester batting and some cotton batting and we'll get a little bit into what the differences between those are and what you want to choose a little later on but so you will want some batting for quilting. We're also going to need some smaller supplies. So we're going to need some rulers.

We'll go over a lot of the different shapes and sizes and styles of rulers but just a basic straight ruler is a good one to start out with. Then of course we're going to need a pressing surface and a rotary mat. So I have that laid here and I have all my tools on top of that. Now all the tools that I have here, we're going to use at some point in time in today's class. we have our instruments for cutting.

We have our rotary cutters. We have a couple of different sizes of these rotary cutters. We have a pair of scissors and then we have what are called snips and these are really handy for cutting your threats. So that's something I like to have. Also, if I have, maybe a big project I'm going to do, I like to make sure that I have backups or extras of things.

So in this case, I have another blade for my rotary cutter in case the one I'm using starts to become dull. So I always have extras of things like that. We're also going to need pins. We're going to need both straight pins, I have some smaller ones here and some longer ones in a little case here. And these are going to be what we're gonna use for piecing, for actually holding our layers of fabric together.

Once we've made our quilt top and it's time to layer it with some batting and some backing fabric, we're going to use basting pins. These may look a lot like safety pins but if you take a close look at one you can see that it has a little bit of a bend to it and this makes it much easier to put through all those layers. So we have both basing pins and regular straight pins. We're also going to need some needles and thread. So I just have a couple of varieties of thread here I have neutral colors And then of course I have some more vibrant colors.

These can be used for quilting, they can really add dimensions to your quilts if you add those extra colors during your quilting. I also have needles and I'm just using a universal needle. This is one that you would either that comes with your machine or you can go purchase a universal machine, universal needle for your machine. And this works great for all the cotton fabrics that we'll be using. We're also going to need some sort of marking pens or pencils.

So I have quite the variety of them here. You can see they come in different colors so I have a white one and a black one. So if I'm using darker fabrics I would use my white marking pencil and then lighter fabrics I'd use my dark one. They also come in a mechanical version like this that comes with an eraser. So this is just like a regular mechanical pencil, I can draw on my fabric and erase it when I'm not needing that Mark anymore.

There's also marking pins like this that are in some way removable in this case, this one washes out. So you can just simply make your marks on your fabric and then wash when you're done. This one is what's known as an iron off pen, so you can make your marks and then use your iron and it will remove that marking. This is actually chalk. So all this white in here is just powder chalk and you take the cap off and you can actually make little marks, see them there on your fabric with chalk and then when you're done, you simply just wipe it away.

Bunch of different marking options, you'll need just one kind of those. I mentioned an iron earlier, for removing these marks. Of course, we will need an iron as well when it comes to pressing our fabric. Just a standard iron will work, it can or cannot have a steam function either one will be just fine. Then of course, we're going to a similar quilt and we're actually going to do some quilting.

So a lot of times you can do some free form or free motion quilting and there's a bunch of different quilting that we'll go over today. And you can also buy at quilting designs and these are just essentially fancy stencils. So you have the option to purchase some quilting designs as well. Another thing we'll use after we've quilted and we've got to the binding portion of our quilt, is we can use these binder clips. Now these are just little clips that we'll use to secure our layers of our quilt together and secure that binding onto our quilts.

Sometimes these are a lot easier to use than pins because the pins can be a little bit tricky to get in there and then maybe they fall out when you're sewing, so if you want to non pin option these binder clips are a great choice. So these are all of the different tools and supplies we're going to need throughout our quilting journey today. So this will be a great time to maybe press pause on this class, gather up some supplies you might already have, if you do some other sewing and maybe get a few new things that you don't already have. And then we're gonna come back here and we're gonna start talking about some fabric.