Every quilt, from a baby quilt to a king size, is the same three layers: a top, some batting, and a backing, held together by stitching and finished at the edge with binding. That is the whole craft. Everything else is a variation on the four steps below.
This guide takes a first quilt from nothing to a finished quilt on a bed. It is written for someone who has a sewing machine, has never made a quilt, and is not sure what to buy first. Read it once through before you buy anything, because the first decisions, about what you buy, save you the most work.
The four steps, before we start
- Piece the top. Sew fabric pieces together into a flat panel.
- Baste. Layer the top, the batting and the backing and hold them together.
- Quilt. Stitch through all three layers so they stay put.
- Bind. Cover the raw edge with a folded strip.
A first quilt goes wrong in step one far more often than in steps two to four. That is where accuracy is decided, and accuracy is what makes the corners meet.
Choose the easiest possible route in
There are three ways to start, and they are not equally hard.
The easiest: a quilt kit
A kit is the whole quilt in one bag. Fabric already chosen and cut, backing included, binding included, pattern printed. Nothing to calculate, nothing to match, and no trip back to the shop because you were half a yard short.
Lea Louise reviewed one of ours on her channel and picked out the detail that matters most for a beginner: the backing arrives already cut and ready to piece. Her words were that it saves time and creates accuracy for you, because you are not cutting a long length of backing crooked or off centre.
Our Precut Quilt Kits are the shortest distance between deciding to quilt and having a quilt. If you want the exact one Lea Louise made, it is the Modern Patchwork beginner kit, 64 by 72 inches, built from just two block shapes.
The next easiest: a precut
A precut is a pack of fabric already cut into one size, all from a single collection, so the colours already work together. The one to start with is a charm pack: 5 inch squares, usually 40 or 42 to a pack depending on the maker. Count yours before you plan the layout, because 42 squares lay out 6 across and 7 down, and 40 lay out 5 across and 8 down. Either way you have a quilt top and you have cut nothing at all.
Be clear about the size you are getting. A 5 inch square finishes at 4 1/2 inches once the seams are taken, so a 42 square top measures 27 by 31 1/2 inches. That is a baby quilt or a wall hanging, not something for a bed. Add a border, or use two packs, if you want it bigger.
This is the route Melanie Ham teaches in the beginner series we cover in our article on her Your First Quilt tutorial, and her reasoning is exactly right: using a precut takes one of the daunting steps out of a first quilt so you can get straight to sewing.
Browse Charm Packs to start there, or the wider Pre-Cut Fabric range if you want strips or 10 inch squares instead.
The hardest: yardage
Buying fabric by the yard and cutting it yourself gives you complete freedom and adds a whole skill you have not learned yet. It is the right route for your third quilt, not your first.
The quarter inch seam, which decides everything
Quilting uses a quarter inch seam allowance. Every pattern assumes it. If your seam is 1/16 of an inch too wide, each seam eats an extra 1/8 of an inch, because every seam has two seam allowances in it. A row of 6 squares contains 5 seams, so that row finishes 5/8 of an inch short. The blocks then do not fit each other, and no amount of careful sewing later fixes it.
The same five strips, sewn twice. The lower piece was sewn with a true quarter inch seam. The upper one was sewn on the machine’s printed mark and finished narrower. Nothing else changed.
So test your machine before you sew anything real. Yvonne, who has been sewing and quilting for over fifty years, demonstrates the test on our channel, and it takes five minutes.
- Cut 5 strips, 1 1/2 inches by 5 1/2 inches. Scraps are fine.
- Sew all 5 together along the long edges, using whatever quarter inch mark your machine has.
- Press.
- Measure. If your seam is a true quarter inch, the piece is a 5 1/2 inch square.
Take the test to your machine.
We made a printable two page version: the four steps, a 5 1/2 inch bar printed at true size to lay the pressed piece against, and a table that turns whatever you measure into the exact error in your seam allowance. Download the Quarter Inch Seam Test (PDF). Print it at 100 percent, never fit to page, and check the calibration scale on page one before you trust it.
One thing to check before you start. The printed marks on the needle plate assume the needle sits in its centre position, which is where most machines put it when you switch them on. If you have moved the needle for something else, those marks no longer mean what they say.
When Yvonne ran the test on camera she was off by almost half an inch. Five strips means four seams, so that is 1/8 of an inch lost at every seam, from a seam allowance only 1/16 of an inch too wide. It is the arithmetic above, happening to someone who has been quilting for fifty years, and that is the point. The quarter inch mark printed on your machine is a starting guess, not a measurement.
The fix is either to move the needle over, or to give the fabric a physical edge to run against. Our Seam Guide Ruler is the second option. You drop the needle through the quarter inch hole in the ruler, then clamp the magnetic guide that comes with it against the ruler's edge. The fabric runs along the magnet instead of along a line you have to watch, and you guide it with one finger and let the feed dogs pull it through.
If you do not have one, the improvised version Yvonne shows works the same way: 7 or 8 layers of 1 1/2 inch painter's tape, trimmed straight, cut to 1/4 inch wide and stuck down just in front of the feed dogs.
The needle drops through the quarter inch hole in the ruler, which fixes the position before the magnet goes on.
Expect to adjust twice. With the guide set, Yvonne's second test came out about 1/16 of an inch short, and she moved the guide over by what she called two threads' worth to close it. A test, a small correction, a second test. Once you find the position, mark it on the machine bed with a fine line so you can set it again in seconds.
The magnetic guide clamped in place. The fabric edge runs along the block, so you stop having to watch a printed line.
Two more habits belong here. Sew a consistent speed, because the seam wanders when you sprint and brake. And chain piece: feed the next pair through without cutting the thread between them. It is faster and it keeps the seam identical from piece to piece.
Pressing, which is not ironing
Ironing means sliding a hot plate across fabric. Pressing means putting it down, holding, and lifting it straight up. Slide an iron across a pieced seam and you stretch it on the bias, and a stretched block will not square up.
Use a dry iron. Steam relaxes cotton and lets it distort. Press and lift, press and lift, along the seam.
Press the seam to one side rather than open. Then, when you join two rows, make the seams on one row face left and the seams on the next row face right. The two ridges lock against each other and hold the intersection in place while you sew it. Quilters call this nesting, and it is the single trick that produces corners that actually meet.
Pin every intersection until you have the feel for it. Take each pin out before it reaches the needle.
Cutting, if you are cutting
If you went the kit or precut route you can skip this for now. If you are cutting, the whole thing rests on three points: a sharp blade, a ruler that does not move, and a mat you replace before it is worn out.
A dull rotary blade skips, and when it skips you press harder, and when you press harder the ruler creeps, and the piece comes off the mat short. It starts as a blade problem and ends as an accuracy problem. Change the blade the moment it starts to skip, not four days later. Our Rotary Cutter Blades and Quilting Rulers cover both ends of that, and our full guide to cutting fabric accurately covers the technique.
Backing, batting and basting
The backing needs to be larger than the top, about 4 inches spare on every side, because the layers shift as you quilt. Standard fabric is around 42 inches wide, so any quilt wider than that needs the backing pieced, unless you buy wide backing.
Wide backing fabric is 108 inches across and removes that seam entirely, which for a first quilt is one less thing to get wrong. If you do piece it, our step by step guide to piecing a backing walks through it.
Batting is the middle layer. What we stock is an 80/20 cotton polyester blend with no scrim, which is a sound general choice for a first quilt: enough cotton to grip the layers so they move less, enough polyester to pass easily under a domestic machine. It comes in twin at 72 by 90 inches, full at 81 by 96, and queen at 90 by 108. A small first quilt means cutting a twin down, so buy once and keep the offcut for the next one.
The batting needs the same margin as the backing, 4 inches spare on every side. Cut both generously and trim after quilting, never before.
Basting is holding the three layers together while you quilt. Build the sandwich in this order:
- Backing, wrong side up, smoothed flat.
- Batting on top of it.
- Quilt top on top of that, right side up.
Then pin through all three with curved safety pins every 4 to 6 inches, or use basting spray. Work from the centre outwards. Wrinkles trapped now become permanent tucks later.
Quilting the layers
For a first quilt, stitch in the ditch: sew along the seam lines you already have. The stitching disappears into the seam, so a wobble does not show, which makes it the most forgiving way to quilt a first quilt. A walking foot helps, because it feeds the top layer at the same rate as the bottom one and stops the sandwich shifting.
Start in the middle and work outwards, in both directions, rather than sewing all the lines in the same direction. That distributes the fullness instead of pushing it all to one edge.
There is a limit here worth knowing about before you hit it. Everything above works while the quilt fits under the arm of a domestic machine. A bed sized quilt does not. The way around it is quilt as you go, where each block is quilted on its own and joined afterwards, so the whole quilt never has to pass under the machine at once.
Binding the edge
Binding is a folded strip of fabric sewn over the raw edge.
- Cut strips 2 1/2 inches wide across the width of the fabric.
- Join them end to end at 45 degrees, so the join is not bulky.
- Fold in half lengthways and press.
- Sew it to the front of the quilt and mitre the corners.
- Fold it over to the back and finish by hand or by machine.
How much do you need? Measure the perimeter of the quilt and add about 10 inches for the corners and the join.
Our no bulky seams binding tutorial covers the diagonal joins and the seam allowance to attach it, and our guide to borders, backing, quilting and binding takes any finished top through to the end.
What to buy for a first quilt
You need less than the internet suggests.
- Fabric, ideally a kit or a charm pack
- Backing and batting, or a kit that includes both
- A rotary cutter, a mat and one square ruler
- Thread, a neutral 50 weight cotton
- Curved safety pins or basting spray
- An iron, which you already own
That is it. A walking foot and a quarter inch foot are worth having and can wait. Everything on that list beyond the fabric lives in Notions, apart from the thread, which has its own Thread collection.
The mistake that stops most first quilts
It is not a technique. It is unpicking.
A first quilt will have an intersection that does not meet. Melanie Ham says the right thing about this in her tutorial: if the stitch is sound and the fabric is joined, leave it and keep going, because nothing discourages a beginner faster than unpicking their own work. Nobody looks at a finished quilt and finds that corner. You will, for about a week, and then you will not.
The five errors that actually cost you accuracy, as opposed to the ones you worry about, are in our article on beginner quilting mistakes.
How long a first quilt takes
A charm pack baby quilt is a weekend if you are unhurried: an afternoon to piece the top, an hour to baste, an evening to quilt, an evening to bind. A throw sized kit is two or three weekends. Nobody makes a bed sized quilt first, and there is no reason to.
When you are ready for the next one, our free quilt patterns library holds more than three hundred designs, all free to download.
