Beginner Quilting Session 2: Fabric

One of the best place about making a quilt, is getting to pick the fabric. There's so many different colors and prints and even textures of fabric, that it can almost be a little bit overwhelming, if you've never gone and bought fabric before. You can walk into a fabric store, and there are just rows and rows of selection. Now, quilts can be made out of a lot of different fabrics. You could use a fleece or flannel say for a baby's blankets, you could also use a linen or a home deck fabric, something a little bit heavier, if you're going to make, a quilted purse, or maybe a quilted pillow or something.

For this class we gonna focus on quilters cotton. Now quilters cotton, is a high quality, 100% cotton fabric. Quilters cotton can still shrink, but it tends to shrink less, than a less expensive cotton. And it's also very colorfast. So, if you pick a really wild and crazy pattern with a lot of fun colors, you don't have to worry so much about those colors bleeding, If you wash your quilts.

Now, if you want to avoid all of that happening, you can prewash your fabric first, so you just wash it and press it, and then it looks just like you bought it from the store, but it's already washed and ready to go to be used. Now, in general if you're using 100% cotton fabric, you'll also wanna use 100% cotton thread. And that's just a good thing to keep in mind when you're picking your fabric. So, there are so many different ways you can buy a fabric. and we gonna go over some of those ways right now.

The first way, is just fabric straight off the bolt. And this is one of the most common ways you're going to find fabric, when you walk into a fabric store you see just rows and rows of bolts of fabric. And this is a way that you can buy it. Now, the width of a bolt of fabric can vary greatly, but in general, quilters cotton will be found on a bolt of fabric, between 40 and 45 inches in width. You can then buy any length of fabric you want, anywhere from a couple inches, up to five, 10 plus yards of fabric.

So it's a really great way to buy fabric, if you know you're going to use a lot of it, maybe you're buying it and you know that the pieces, that you're going to be cutting are fairly large, you wanna buy fabric in large sections like this. Now, another way you can buy fabric, is what's called a fat quarter. Now, fat quarters can look, several different ways when you buy them. One of the most common ways, is just little folded squares like these, and sometimes they'll say fat quarters, sometimes they'll say fabric quarters, but they'll come either folded like this, sometimes there'll be rolled like this, and then sometimes they'll even be bundled, either by colors or maybe a certain theme or something. Now, what a fat quarter is, is no matter how it is packaged or bundled or folded, when you unfold it all the way out, is going to be a rectangle that's 18 by 21 inches.

Now, when you think about a yard of fabric, sorry, a quarter yard of fabric, quarter yard is nine inches by your 42 inches in width. So, what they've done to create a fat quarter, is take that extra height from the width of the fabric, and bring it around to the side, and it creates a fat quarter. Now, fat quarters are great ways to buy fabric, if you know that you're not going to need a lot of one certain color, or maybe the pieces you gonna be cutting out, are a lot smaller, and it's also a fun way to buy fabric, if you want to buy some pre mashed or pre bundled fabric. Maybe you're unsure about matching certain prints together, if you're not sure if they match, you can go in, and like this example here, was just all these fabrics came bundled together, and they may not necessarily look like prints that all go together, especially like these, but they do all match. And they come in this pre matched bundle like that.

So, I could just use all of these fabrics in one piece, and I'd feel pretty confident that they all match. You can also buy fat quarters that match because they have some sort of they're all the same solid color, maybe they're all just tones or variations of a different solid color, or solid colors like this that match. So, it's also again a fun way to have a variety, of different solid colors or printed colors. And then another fun way is of course around the holidays, you can get a fabric bundles and many different holidays, whether it's Christmas or Halloween, Easter, anything. And its also make really fun gifts to give to someone to as a little bundle of fabric.

If you know that they're a sewer or a quilter. So those are fat quarters, then we also have some other pre-cut sizes of fabric that we can get. And one of those is this one here. Now, these are pre-cut 10 inch squares of fabric, and this is called the layer cake. Now, depending on the manufacturer, you may get different amounts, of fabric in your layer cake, but in general you'll get roughly right around 40 pieces.

Now these are a great thing to buy, if say the pattern you're using already calls for 10 inch squares, you can just get this, and then go right home and start sewing. You don't even have to do any cutting to your fabric. These also come pre-match to a certain degree, you can either buy a layer cake that is all one color, or you could get them that are different solids or in this case, we have a collection done by a fabric designer. And so, we have all different colors in our layer cake that somehow match. And as you can see, some of the patterns are repeated, throughout this layer cake.

So, we may have, one or two of the same fabric within our bundle. So we know that if we're making a bigger project, and using all of the fabric from this bundle, we'll have enough to be distributed evenly through our project. Another pre-cut square we can get, is a five inch square. And so this is, and this is called a charm pack. And again, these are great, if you know that you're going to be needing a lot of five inch squares in your, your quilt design.

Again, depending on the manufacturer, the number in your charm pack will vary. This one again has around 40, and you can get really small charm packs, that have only eight or 10 pieces of fabric, up to some much larger ones. Again, they're matched by some sort of color or collection, so in this case this one was called, stonehenge colored chips, so we have all these sort of, rock or slates kind of looks to them, so that'd be a great to put all those together in a fun little project. Of course, the smaller our pre-cuts get the smaller our overall project, that we're putting them in may get. But, again another fun way, to buy some fabric.

Going yet another step smaller, we have what's called a mini charm pack. Charm packs are five in squares, mini charm packs are two and a half inch squares. Again, depending on the manufacturer differs in the number of them, and also matched just like all these other pre-cuts are matched. But, really the more small squares like these, that are in a design or something that I'm wanting to make, the more I want to buy these already pre-cut. Cutting out of tenants square, isn't that much of a hustle, but cutting tons and tons of two and a half inch squares, that can become kind of tedious.

So, if you can find a fabric you like and buy those already pre-cut, that's definitely a way to go. So we have a lot of pre-cut square options, we also have some pre-cut strip options. So, you see this is a roll of a bunch of fabric strips altogether, and this is called a jelly roll. Sometimes you'll find them they're called honey rolls, or cinnamon rolls, there's a bunch of different names for these, but again, these are pre-cut strips, and they're two and a half inches by 40 inches. So, this is a great way to buy fabric if you know you gonna add a lot of strips to your project.

You could even use these as bindings, if you have a fairly small square, you can add sashing strips maybe between your blocks and your project, and again, these are matched either by sort of a collection, of the same color or a tone of a color, anything like that. And what's fun to do is you can actually buy, all these different pre-cuts, in the same colored pattern. So, I have here a layer cake and a jelly roll that as you can see are the same wintry, golds and blacks everything matches they're the same collection. So, I could take both of these, go home and make some sort of, small christmassy type quilts and never actually have to cut out any fabric. So, this is a fun way to buy fabric, if you're just starting out, and you really just want to go home and start sewing right away, not worry about cutting.

Once you start realizing what kind of quilts you like to make, or maybe you have a favorite quilt pattern you wanna make, you might find that you have a favorite way to buy fabric. For me, it is fabric straight off the bolts and fat quarters. I love to buy fat quarters at any given time I'll have a few to a few dozen just lying around my sewing room, and I usually have them in solid colors. Or maybe some neutral colors. I'll have maybe some black and white, some gray and I like to just have them on hand, because I find they're really easy to just add into a project.

I may not know what I'm going to use them in when I get them, but, say I have a project, I'm using these fabrics here and I just want a little bit extra pop of pink or something that's plain, well, I know I can go to my stash of fat quarters, and I'll probably have a couple of different shades of pink or something that I can choose from. So, a great little thing to have on hand, they don't take up too much room to stack them on a bookshelf or something. They're a good thing to have. The other way, my favorite way of buying fabric is just straight off the bolt. And I like to do this because, I like to go to a fabric store, and find something I like, like any one of these here, and just get a couple yards of it.

I still don't know what I'm going to make, out of these fabrics, but I know that whatever I'm going to make, I'll have enough to be able to cut pieces out of it. Whereas if I go to the store and I buy a bunch of these mini charm packs, I know that whatever I use this in, my design is going to be limited to, having to incorporate two and a half inch squares. So, if I don't know what I'm gonna use the fabric for, I would definitely recommend getting it in the larger pieces. Either off the bolts or in the fat quarters. So now, there are a lot of different pre-cut options you can pick from, that can really cut down on the amount of cutting that you have to do, but it is inevitable that eventually we're going to need to cut some fabric.

So, I'm gonna gather up my fabric cutting supplies, and then we'll move on to cutting our fabric.