Day 1 - How on Earth do I make a patchwork quilt?
I have done a lot of research and have watched many YouTube tutorials; I’ve read blogs and have googled almost everything to do with patchwork quilting. I would say I feel fairly confident but I’d just be lying. Sewing bits of fabric together, easy - I thought. Wrong!
Not only are there all these different methods to making a quilt, no, making a quilt seems to come with it’s own secret society where only a select few know the language. I’m talking about a lot of quilt related jargon! Eskimos allegedly have over 100 different words for snow; that’s nothing, these quilting experts have 1,000 different terms for each different aspect of the quilt. On top of that, there’s pages and pages of information specifically relating to JUST picking colours.
When trying something new, be it food or a task at work, everyone is naturally apprehensive at first, not me, I had to lie down for about an hour to get my heart rate back to normal as the reality and enormity of what I had committed to do, had sunk in.
So I calmed myself, my fiancé made me lots of tea and I faced just the task in front of me, which was simply to work out the basics of making a quilt.
My advice to anyone attempting to do this would be to make sure you Google the jargon first of all (and ‘hexies’ simply means ‘hexagon’) 😉
I finally managed to bypass the expert ‘quilters’ and came across a method called 'English Paper Piecing’. This method is particularly suitable for hand-making the quilt (as I don’t have a Singer laying around). I’ll go through the method in more detail in my next few blogs.
Once I had found the information I needed (and after saving this), I had decided on an approximate pattern: hexagons with most of the patches a blue colour to tie in with my Guiding theme.
My next task is to buy everything I needed to start…
