How to Quilt: A Beginner's Guide to Quilting

According to Penny Halgren, all it takes is nine easy steps to transform ordinary fabric into a handmade quilt that your family and friends will love, admire and cherish – even if you have never made a quilt before.

Begin by learning a little about quilting history in the United States, and how it has changed with the growth in technology. Move onto the actual process of making a quilt: start looking at how color choices affect the final look of your quilt, and see how easy or challenging it is to work with different shapes of fabric – from squares to curves. Find out how to choose colores and select fabrics, in a chapter that covers the various types of fabrics and how to decide which is best for making a quilt.

You are then ready to cut. In addition to fully illustrated instructions, you will also find tips to cut your fabric strips with rotary cutter accuracy and efficiency – saving time and fabric. Learn the secrets of sewing accurate seam allowances; chain sew your strips and block units together with speed and accuracy. Find out how to arrange your blocks and keep them in the order you want them sewn – without pulling your hair out! Shortcuts are provided for sewing the blocks together to finish your quilt top painlessly.

Discover some of the many choices for your borders, from simple fabric strips to pieced borders. Glide through accurate measurement of your border strips, ensuring a “squared up” quilt. Move on then to layering your quilt. How many different kinds of batting are there? And what and the benefits and drawbacks of each? Which is right for your quilt? All of these questions, and many more, are answered.

Last, but not least, learn techniques for both hand quilting and machine quilting, and discover the ease of making your own binding – in a continuous binding strip – saving you time and money, and making your quilt’s finishing touches even more perfect.

No necessary detail is left out! In each chapter, you will find tips and tricks for completing the step in the shortest amount of time possible with the greatest of ease and simplicity. All of the confusing terms are defined, and the book is jam-packed with full color photographs of each step along the way.

If you are a beginner quilter, or are looking for the perfect gift for someone starting out on their quilting journey... look no further, because this is it! Highly recommended.

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