Create your own handmade quilts: 5 Hand Quilting Techniques from Quilting Daily

Larissa Davis — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 14:58:43 GMT

To anyone who loves fabric and thread, making a handmade quilt is often the ultimate creative experience. The contemplative act of hand quilting—needle moving rhythmically over and under fabric—is a pleasure even for those
who primarily rely on machine quilting enjoy. But you don’t have to know how to quilt by hand to create a handmade, quilted piece. Many contemporary art quilters add hand quilting and embroidery to their fabric art. The hand stitching lends a personal touch to a handcrafted quilt.

In our free eBook, Create Your Own Handmade Quilts: 5 Hand Quilting Techniques from Quilting Daily, we give you
five different takes on making handmade quilts. In Art Quilting Made Easy, Lesley Riley shows how you can make a simple yet beautiful homemade quilt with a few simple tools. Lesley also describes how to hand quilt your piece in different ways to
add dimension and interest.

If you enjoy a lot of hand stitching, you’ll love Ellen Scott’s technique for using stitching, scraps, and small embellishments
to make a colorful narrative homemade quilt. In Painting with Thread, Stitching a Story, Ellen shows how this kind of quilt’s handmade appearance gives it a homespun, heartfelt quality. Sylvia Naylor’s homemade quilts are literally that: quilts depicting homes through fabric collage. The unique design method she describes in Home Free that begins with paper collage is easy to follow, especially if you think you “can’t draw.”

Another easy way to begin making handcrafted quilts is by starting small and using materials you have on hand, like Natalya Aikens does in Go Green: Ecofriendly Journal Quilting Techniques. Using her guidelines for making small, weekly handmade quilts with recycled materials will give you the freedom to have fun and experiment.

If you’d rather skip a lot of the functional sewing and focus on hand quilting the details, or simply don’t have that much time to sew, Laura Wasilowski offers a step-by-step guide to fusing quilts in Fusing 101. Her lesson includes a project for you to use your newfound fusing skills to make your own handcrafted quilt.

So you can see, no matter what your interest, Create Your Own Handmade Quilts: 5 Hand Quilting Techniques from Quilting Daily will give you the tools and inspiration you need to create your own handmade quilts.

4 Fine Sewing Techniques from Quilting Arts: Sewing Ideas to Expand Your Stitchery and Sewing Machine Techniques for Quilting

Larissa Davis — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 12:48:06 GMT

When it comes to creating a quilt, stitching is like the icing on the cake. After all the piecing and surface design are complete, we quilters use needle and thread to add a final element of design, texture, and color, truly bringing the piece to life.

This free eBook contains several ideas for allowing your stitching to take center stage. First, Laura Wasilowski uses hand stitching to add vibrancy and color. Then, Jackie Cardy shows how to create samplers of serendipitous hand stitching inspired by mid-century motifs. If you’ve ever wondered what to do with all of those programed pattern stitches on your machine, you’ll love Carole Redlich’s article on using these designs to create Impressionist-style pieces. Finally, Terry White describes the basics of thread painting, and shares one of her patterns to get you going.

Quilting Arts Articles : quilting

Create your own handmade quilts: 5 Hand Quilting Techniques from Quilting Daily

4 Fine Sewing Techniques from Quilting Arts: Sewing Ideas to Expand Your Stitchery and Sewing Machine Techniques for Quilting