Beginner's Guide to Quilting: Start Your First Project

Why quilting is easier than it looks

Quilting has a reputation for being fiddly, traditional and slightly intimidating, but at its heart it is only three skills: cutting straight, sewing straight, and layering fabric neatly. You do not need a specialist machine or a dedicated studio. A basic sewing machine with a straight stitch, a table to work on and a bit of patience will carry you through your first project beautifully.

My strongest advice for a beginner is to start small. A pram-sized quilt, a lap quilt or even a large cushion cover gives you the full experience — cutting, piecing, layering, quilting and binding — without months of work. Aim for something you can finish in a fortnight. Finished projects teach you far more than perfect ones that never get completed.

Your starter kit should include a rotary cutter, a self-healing cutting mat, a long quilting ruler, 100% cotton fabric, low-loft wadding, a decent all-purpose thread, curved safety pins and an iron. Almost everything else is a luxury.

Choosing fabric and wadding for your first quilt

Work with 100% cotton quilting fabric. It presses crisply, frays politely, holds a crease and behaves predictably under the needle. Avoid stretchy jersey, slippery satins and heavy upholstery weights until you have a few quilts behind you. Pre-wash your fabric in a warm wash, dry it flat and press it before cutting, so any shrinkage happens now rather than after your quilt is finished.

For a first quilt, choose a simple palette of four or five fabrics:

• One feature print you genuinely love, in about a metre
• Two or three blenders — small-scale prints, dots or subtle stripes — in a fat quarter each
• One plain light fabric, such as a cream or soft grey, for contrast and breathing space

Bear in mind that fat quarters in the UK are usually cut around 18 x 22 inches (roughly 46 x 56 cm), and quilting patterns are almost always written in inches even here, so an imperial ruler is worth owning. For wadding, choose a low-loft 100% cotton or an 80/20 cotton-polyester blend; both are easy to quilt through by machine or by hand and drape nicely. Do check the manufacturer's maximum quilting distance — it tells you how far apart your quilting lines can be, and ignoring it leads to lumpy wadding after washing.

Cutting straight: the rotary cutter and ruler

Accurate cutting is where good quilts are made. Fold your fabric selvedge to selvedge, line up the folded edge with a grid line on your mat, and square off the raw end first — never trust the shop's cut to be straight.

• Always cut away from your body, with the blade guard closed between cuts
• Press down firmly on the ruler and keep your fingers well inside its edge
• Cut strips first, then subcut them into squares or rectangles — this is far more accurate than cutting shapes individually
• Change your blade the moment it starts skipping; a sharp blade is safer than a blunt one

If a strip comes out slightly wavy, trim it rather than hoping the sewing machine will forgive you. It will not.

Piecing: mastering the scant quarter-inch seam

Most quilting patterns assume a quarter-inch (about 6 mm) seam, and "scant" means a thread or two narrower than the full quarter inch to allow for the fold around the thread. Test yours before you begin: sew two scrap squares together, press the seam open and measure the finished unit. If it is too small, move your needle position or adjust your seam guide.

When joining pieces, pin or clip at the seam intersections and let the machine feed the fabric rather than tugging it. Do not backstitch at the beginning and end of pieces that will be joined to something else; those stitches only add bulk. Press seams to one side, usually towards the darker fabric, and "nest" opposing seams together when joining rows — the bulk sits beside each other rather than piling up. Chain piecing, where you feed pairs through one after another without cutting the thread, saves a surprising amount of time.

Layering and quilting the sandwich

Your quilt sandwich is backing, wadding, then quilt top. Cut the backing and wadding about 8 cm larger than the top all round. Tape the backing right side down to a hard floor, smooth the wadding over it, then centre the top. Baste with a temporary fabric adhesive spray or curved safety pins placed roughly a hand's width apart.

Quilt from the centre outwards to push any fullness to the edges. A walking foot makes straight-line quilting far easier on a domestic machine, and simple diagonal lines or a grid are perfect for a first attempt. Alternatively, hand quilt with a longer needle and quilting thread, taking small, even running stitches. Either way, do not quilt more densely than you enjoy — your first quilt only needs to be finished.

Binding and finishing

For a quick, neat finish, cut binding strips 2½ inches wide, join them on the diagonal, fold in half and press. Sew the binding to the front of the quilt, mitre the corners by folding the strip up and back down, then wrap it to the back and slip stitch it down by hand. If hand stitching fills you with dread, the "birthing" method — sewing the layers right sides together, leaving a gap, turning through and topstitching — gives you a finished quilt with no binding at all, and there is no shame in choosing it for quilt number one.

Label your quilt with your name and the date, even if it is only a small embroidered initial in the corner. Then use it, wash it, and enjoy the crinkled, soft texture that only appears after a quilt has been properly lived with. Your second quilt will be better, and your third better still.