The hundreds of phrases and techniques you’ll come across with your first quilt can easily overwhelm you as a beginner. The fact that there are numerous ways to complete each job involved in constructing a quilt might add to the confusion.
As you gain more experience, you’ll undoubtedly find the quilting techniques that suit you best, but mastering the fundamental techniques will enable you to stitch accurate quilts on your first attempt. Taking an improv quilting class may be just what you need to step into quilting without the restrictions of rules.
It gives you the freedom to follow your ideas and explore your creativity without worrying about following a specific pattern in your mind. Improv quilting builds the pattern without any planned structure in mind as the quilters continue to stitch, helping you to create your unique style and method, which would be visible on your quilt.
11 Essential Skills Every Beginner Quilter Must Learn to Make a Quilt from Beginning to Finish
Quilting is an art that requires skills, effort, and hard work. You may not become perfect in an hour, but with patience and effort, it is a skill one can learn.
To successfully step into the world of quilting, there are some basic skills that you must learn to make your journey easier, as once you have mastered these skills making a quilt becomes considerably simple for you.
Brief overview of the benefits of having a quilting business
Starting a quilting business can provide many benefits and can be a fulfilling and profitable venture. Here are just a few of the benefits of having a quilting business:
Creative Outlet: Quilting allows for creativity and self-expression, which can be especially rewarding for those who enjoy working with their hands. By starting a quilting business, you can turn your passion into a career.
Flexibility: Owning a quilting business gives you the flexibility to set your own schedule and work from home. This can be particularly appealing for those who are looking for a side hustle or who want to supplement their income
Potential for Growth: With the right marketing and promotion, a quilting business has the potential to grow and expand over time. As your reputation and skill level grows, so too can your business.
Financial Benefits: Quilting is a marketable skill and can provide a good source of income. With the right products and marketing, a quilting business can be a lucrative venture.
Customer Satisfaction: Quilting allows you to create a product that is both beautiful and functional, providing customers with a product they will cherish and appreciate. This can lead to repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals, which can be crucial to the growth of your business.
Amongst the many skills and techniques that go into quilting, here is a list of 11 skills that would be helpful to a beginner to start making quilts.
1. Familiarize Yourself With The Terminology
It’s a good idea to become familiar with the terms you’ll need and frequent abbreviations used with patterns before you begin if you’re learning how to sew a quilt. Because of this, having basic quilting books on hand can be useful when creating a quilt.
Additionally, before you begin, try reading quilting articles like this one. Look up words you don’t understand when you come across them. You won’t need much time to become familiar with the vocabulary necessary to understand instructions for constructing quilts.
2. Basic Knowledge Of Sewing Machines
Every quilter needs to understand the fundamentals of operating their sewing machines. Oiling, threading, changing needles, modifying stitch length, and adjusting tension are all necessary abilities. Every sewing machine has its functions, and you must understand its features, capacity, techniques, and servicing requirements to use it smoothly without issues.
3. Knowledge of Fabrics and Its Quality
Fabrics are the base of quilts, but you might be surprised how many people start to create their first quilt without putting thoughts into getting the fabric’s characteristics to work for them.
Once you know how to take care of your fabrics and why quilting patches are cut according to certain rules, making a quilt becomes a lot simpler. Buying the most expensive fabrics is not required, but spending several hours making a quilt with thin fabric that won’t hold up during use and washes seems a waste of time and effort.
4. Rotary Cutting Techniques
Learn how to use rotary cutting since it reduces the time-consuming procedure of creating templates to mark and cut individual pieces of fabric. Rotary cutting techniques are essential for all beginning quilters. If you know the basics, you can create a straightforward rendition of nearly any quilt block you see.
5. Pressing Technique
Stitching substantial pieces of fabric together is possible using strip piecing and other speedy piecing techniques, then cutting off pieces to make pre-sewn units. It is simple. If you know the basics, you can create a straightforward rendition of nearly any quilt block you see.
6. Quick Piecing Techniques
Spending a little time pressing your quilt blocks as you assemble them will improve the accuracy of your piercing right away. And a great technique to improve your patchwork is to set seams before pressing allowances to one side.
Even when you might anticipate that pressing more will take longer, you’ll save more time when quilt blocks are properly pressed to fit together correctly, and don’t use the dreaded seam ripper.
7. Fixing And Saving
Sewing inaccurate quilt blocks are more common than you think. The majority of the time, they’re smaller than they should be, perhaps due to sewing a slightly larger-than-needed quarter-inch seam allowance or our inadequate pressing. In case it occurs to you, don’t be disheartened because many “off” quilt blocks can be saved.
8. Borders Should Be Correctly Measured and Sewn
Adding borders to a quilt’s edges gives you a great chance to straighten up any slightly wonky edges in addition to giving your work a beautiful frame. Measurements around the outer edges are a common method used by novice quilters to determine border length. This technique ensures that the quilt’s skewness won’t alter. The structure of a quilt can be strengthened by learning how to measure and sew borders.
9. Mitered Binding
Although it has a bit of a bad rap for being challenging, attaching mitered binding to quilt edges is a simple process. Nearly all mitered binding instructions leave off a crucial step, which causes issues for anyone attempting to apply binding broader or narrower than 1/4″. My instructions for quilt binding clarify
10. Don’t Dwell on Mistakes
It’s crucial to learn as much as you can about each of these components, but understanding color value is just as crucial—if not more so—than comprehending the color wheel. We all make mistakes both technically and in terms of fabric selection, but our missteps help us to grasp the quilting process better.
Examine your “mistakes” as opportunities for learning, and keep the knowledge for the next assignment. You will improve your sewing skills with each quilt you make.
11. Label
A quilt isn’t complete until it has a label. And adding a label on the quilt would not only mark it as finished but it would also label it as your product.
Conclusion
Once you have mastered these skills, you can use appliqué, embroidery, decorations, curved piecing, and free-motion quilting to defy the rules and be more imaginative. These are just the 11 basic skills you must know in order to create any quilt from scratch.
Quilting is not a skill you learn in one day but something you must practice every day in order to master it. But don’t let that dishearten you, practice will make perfect. Happy Quilting!