A quilt consists of 5 main parts:

• quilt top, pieced or whole cloth

• batting, to give thickness and body to the quilt

• backing, generally left as plain fabric

• quilting, to secure the quilt sandwich together

• binding, to finish off the raw edges of the quilt

Today I want to give a shout out to one of my favorite quilt designers, Sheri of Whole Circle Studio. She designs using mostly foundation paper piecing and I love her use of bold colors and fun lines and textures. I participated in her Around the World Block of the Month club this year and she’s got another BOM club slated for next year: Botanical Beauties. I also really love her “Big Island” series using simple templates and shapes to create a wide variety of quilts designs.

I went to the St. Louis Modern Quilt Guild meeting for the first time in a long time, partly due to COVID and partly due to other bits of life getting in the way, and it was sooo good. It feels amazing to connect with other people who share the same hobbies and activities and bits of nerdom that you do.

Fabric for quilting obviously comes in yards, typically 40-44” wide and cut from a long bolt of fabric. But that can get pricey if you want a larger variety of fabrics in smaller sizes. There are various precuts available, which are yardages of fabric cut into standard sizes and typically bundled up in a kit. Often designers put together a kit with coordinating fabrics, so you don’t have to pick out all the fabrics yourself.

There are several ways to finish the binding on quilts, but this is how I do it. I use single fold bias tape (more on bias tape in a future post!) and machine sew it to the front side of the quilt, lining up the raw edges. I then fold the folded edge over to the back and use a ladder stitch to finish it by hand. This makes an invisible seam on the back so everything looks nice and neat.

Today I want to give a shoutout to quilter Sarah Ruiz. She is an engineer at NASA and incorporates a lot of science and space elements into her quilts. My favorite quilt of hers is her tribute to the Mars rovers: “Mars is the only known planet inhabited solely by robots”!

Half square triangles (or HSTs) are a common block element in quilting. It’s a pretty straightforward block where the seam runs diagonally across the block to cut the square into 2 different triangles. There are several ways to make them in bulk, such as 2-at-a-time, 4-at-a-time, 8-at-a-time, or I’ve even seen 12-at-a-time.