QUILTING IDEAS for creating great home made quilts.

The wonderful thing about quilters, apart from the quilts that they make obviously, is that they are such a welcoming, generous community. A new arrival at a quilt group is always made welcome and willingly helped with any queries that they may have. With the advent of the internet this has become a global quilting community and patchwork quilts patterns can now be shared across the world. Traditional quilt block patterns can be shared in the same way with many sites offering free quilt patterns showing how these quilt blocks can be used in a quilt. Quilt blocks can be named for what they look like, for example a flower or an animal, or they can be named for an event or as a political statement. One of the ways of sharing ideas in the past was through quilting columns in newspapers and magazines. This often meant that a block might end up with a different name in each region and there are some blocks that have five or six names. This makes it fun choosing a name for a quilt that you have made because you can choose whichever name you prefer to match your quilt. Patchwork quilts patterns often include detailed instructions for making a quilt top but become vague on the subject of quilting it. This may be because everyone has a different idea of how they would quilt a particular quilt and there is no one correct design, but luckily there are many free quilting patterns on the internet so it’s usually possible to find a design that will complement the quilt top in just the way that you want. Free quilt patterns generally use traditional designs so that there are no copyright problems. Some of them use one block only repeated across the quilt, but perhaps the most useful patterns are for sampler quilts where every block is different. This gives other quilters many ideas for future quilts, in much the same way that the very popular Block of the Month quilts do. With these you get a different block pattern each month which is a great way to try out new techniques. One other way that quilters share ideas is in showing different settings for quilts. A quilt may be several straight rows of blocks but the same blocks could also be used in diagonal lines with triangles at the ends of the rows for infill or they could be used in frames around one central block. This is known as a medallion quilt. If there’s anything that you want to know about quilting, you can be sure that someone on the internet will be willing to share it with you.