Quilting is a type of Sewing that produces some kind of layered, padded item, with (sometimes decorative) stitching holding the layers together. In addition to quilts, common Accessories can be made using quilting, along with outerwear (e.g. jackets).
Supplies
- A standard sewing machine. You can get a basic but fully functional model for under $200. More expensive machines work better on thicker fabrics, have more built-in stitch patterns, and generally are less fiddly. Many makerspaces have basic sewing machines available. Use sharps needles for the sewing machine.
- Fancier sewing machine options include “large throat” sewing machines (typically $1500-5000), which make it easier to move around large pieces of fabric when doing quilting. Longarm quilting machines ($8,000-30,000) are optimally designed for doing quilting work. You may be able to rent time on one at a local sewing shop.
- Woven fabric is cheap and widely available; to start with, you can even work with materials like old bed sheets. If you’re using thrifted or repurposed material, fabric can be (close to) free. Good quality quilting cotton with interesting designs can be close to $20/yd. You may also need to look for extra wide (< 60”) cotton fabric for the back of larger quilts.
- Batting for the insulation layer of your quilt; this is available in materials including polyester, cotton, and wool.
- Moreso even than with garment sewing, you’ll quickly want to acquire a rotary cutter and mat, which makes it much easier to cut out pattern pieces. For quilting, you’ll also want to prioritize getting a clear acrylic ruler that makes it easier to cut out things like triangles and squares.
- Wonder clips are better than pins for aligning pieces of fabric together as you go to sew them.
Resources & Tutorials
- All Things Quilting by Alex Anderson
- YouTube: Many videos from Sewing Parts Online are clear tutorials on quilting
Quilt blocks
- Epida studios quilt block directory includes tutorials and videos for most or all quilt blocks
- Quilters’ cache has written instructions and some pictures for their quilt block directory
- Scissortail quilting quilt block library has images, written tutorials, and coloring sheets for the quilt blocks in their directory
On English paper piecing
- All Points Patchwork by Diane Gilleland
- YouTube: How to English Paper Piece (Tula Pink, 40 min)
Designs for quilting
- The Quilter’s Lodge has a large directory of digitized designs you can consult for inspiration
Data and Quilting
Quilting has multiple levels for incorporating data: the fabric itself, the visual design language of quilt blocks, and the quilting process.
Fabric
Quilting cotton is available in many different colors and designs, and can range from extremely affordable to quite expensive. If you want to use designs available on fabric in order to convey some or all of your data, quilting cotton is your best option short of Designing and printing custom fabric.
You can expand beyond quilting cotton and fairly easily substitute other woven (non-stretchy) fabrics of a more-or-less similar weight. (Very thick fabric like denim may become difficult to sew, and very thin fabric like gauze can start to tear and pull apart.) You can even venture into some knit (stretchy) fabric if it is not especially stretchy, and/or if you back it with interfacing, as is commonly done with t-shirt quilts.
Quilt blocks
Quilt blocks offer a design language for quilting that you can use, build on, and adapt when you’re quilting data. You can treat quilt blocks as a whole as a meaning-carrying unit, and map data on the level of how many blocks you have in one design vs. another (e.g. quantity). You could also work with the pieces of fabric that make up a quilt block, e.g. representing data by making the same quilt block in different colors. You can also deconstruct quilt blocks further to make use of color and quantity. A simple 4-patch quilt block could represent 4 columns’ of data in a single row in your data spreadsheet (e.g. you could map the top left square to the value of the first column, the top right square to the second column, etc.) Depending on how complex the data is that you’re trying to capture in each row of your spreadsheet, you could look for a quilt block with a matching number of sub-components. You could also treat a quilt block like a pie chart, and pick one with enough pieces to allow you to represent the smallest “slice” of data you need (e.g. 10 pieces if your smallest slice is 10% of the total).
Quilting
Once you have your quilt top made up of pieces of fabric sewn together, the insulation layer, and backing, you’ll do the actual quilting — the stitching that holds all the pieces together. Quilting can be as simple as straight lines, or it can be elaborate and complex. Both approaches to quilting can be used to convey data. For instance, straight lines could be spaced in a way to represent different intervals of time (e.g. more space between them to represent a longer period of time between two pieces of data in your data set). The number of times a motif is repeated can be another opportunity to represent quantitative data.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Alex Wingate for the pointers to good quilting resources!