Make a Quilt with Me: Beginner Quilt Series || Introduction

I don’t know about you, but quilting is the kind of sewing I find the most therapeutic. Whenever I need a palette cleanser, or just don’t have the brain power to work out pattern alterations and what have you, I tend to get my scraps out or rifle through my drawer of cottons and start a paper piecing or scrap quilt or baby quilt project, just because.

Yesterday we woke up to snow. I was handling this social distance/quarantine situation just fine when we started having nicer weather, but this week of cold weather really had me down! Quilting, like exercise, always boosts my mood, so I typed “scrap quilt” into Pinterest, picked one and got started.

Most modern quilts these days require large swaths of solid colors, which I don’t have and I couldn’t very well go shopping for, so I stuck with a design that could utilize the littler scraps in my bin and didn’t need sashing or anything I’d have to go buy. This scrappy quilt by A Quilt is Nice was my inspiration. After studying it for a few minutes to see how it’s put together, I started cutting my 2.5”x4” rectangles and got sewing.

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After making a few blocks, I snapped a few photos and decided to invite you all to join in the process! Quilting is easy, I promise. If you can sew a straight line, you can make a an entire quilt. This will be a pretty casual thing. I’ll post the process as I go, in a beginner friendly series of tutorials, starting with Part 1 tomorrow (Update: Part 1 is up!) This is not just for beginners, of course. If you’re a seasoned quilter and want a project or a distraction, please join in with this easy scrap quilt project!

Here is what the finished quilt will look like:

I hope you’ll join me! Let’s use the hashtag #quarantinequilt on Instagram so we can follow along with each other. If you are brand new to quilting, here is my post about some essential tools you’ll need, which are:

• A rotary cutter and mat set. (This you’ll need right away. You can of course make a pattern and cut your rectangles with scissors in a pinch, but using a rotary cutter and ruler will be much more accurate and of course faster.)

• A Walking Foot for your machine. (you won’t need this until your top is done, but might as well order it now!)

• Quilting pins. You’ll need two or three packs of these. (Again, you’ll need these later when we make the quilt sandwich, but you can make the whole top without them). An alternative is basting spray or a tag gun.

Edit:

Here are the rest of the posts in the series!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Cheers :)