10 Things I Learned Making My First Quilt

By no means am I fluent in sewing. I’ve made a few things, mostly Halloween costumes and curtains. I enjoy it, but I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily good at it.

My grandma, however, is amazing at it. She’s made two wedding dresses (that I know of) and quilts quite frequently. She even used to send me hand-made Barbie doll clothes every month. As a young girl, that’s pretty freaking cool to get in the mail each month.

She bought me my first sewing machine when I was about 11 or 12. My first project was sewing pajamas. I got a pattern, some fancy feeling fabric, and started making the pajamas.

They weren’t bad, but I didn’t know that certain fabrics weren’t as functional for certain purposes, and the fabric I had did not make a great shirt.

After that, I wanted to make a quilt, just like my grandma. I got four squares in and realized quilts were WAY more work than I had the patience for at the time. Also, fabric is expensive. I scraped the idea and turned those four squares into a pillow and tabled the desire to make a quilt.

Fast forward 15 years, I got a job at a crafting company. There were fabric giveaways like crazy. I had access to watching videos on how to make quilts. Why not give it another shot? I decided to grab some of the fabrics and try again.

When I start anything new, I like to do research, but I don’t like to get too clinical about it. If I have to be precise, I get upset about messing up. I decided I’d make a quilt of various triangles, but not follow a pattern, and I’d gift it to my mother-in-law for Christmas.

Here’s what I learned:

1: Cutting out fabric is tedious

It’s time consuming to cut out a ton of little pieces of fabric, and after awhile, you’ll get overly confident and end up cutting yourself. I did, anyway.

2: Rotary cutters are sharp

This may seem painfully obvious, but as stated above, I cut myself. I cut myself deep. Be careful with these things.

3: A little fabric goes a long way

I cut out way too much fabric. You can go pretty far the fabric, so keep that in mind, as you may not want to make five quilts of the same fabrics in the same shapes.

4: Piecing them together goes pretty quick

As long as you have plenty of pins and a hot iron ready while you’re sewing, this part went pretty fast. It’s also SUPER satisfying to connect pieces to each other.

5: Not all the corners will match up neatly

I had some mismatched meetings of corners, but it adds to the charm of a beginner quilt, right? I think part of this came from inconsistent seam allowances, and some technical difficulties, but overall it was not terrible.

6: Basting Spray is no joke

If I knew how stubborn basting spray was, I would have been A LOT more cautious about laying it out without wrinkles. I didn’t want to lay it on the floor since I have three pets and a clean floor is a pipe dream, so I laid it flat on a bed. This was a mistake. Take the time to clear out floor space and meticulously lay the backing fabric flat, then spray the basting spray. Then ask someone else to help you lay the batting flat on top of that. I did not ask for help. I tried this myself. Learn from my mistake. You need an extra set of hands in this step to make it flat. Once the batting is on the backing flat, then spray again, and get help putting the quilt top on. Again, I didn’t do this. You should do this.

I had wrinkles, and then trying to adjust the wrinkles made things worse and I tore up part of the batting.

7: “Quilting” is tricky

This was my first time trying to quilt- stitching the lines of everything together. My sewing machine was pretty old at this point, but it did okay for the most part. The whole time I was doing this though, I kept dreaming about the fancy long-arm quilting machines and all the cool patterns I’ve seen coming out of those. I did simple straight-ish lines down the whole thing. Someday I’ll attempt something fancier, but I was coming up on my Christmas deadline...

8: Be strategic in bundling your fabric

If you don’t have a fancy long-arm machine, be careful when bunching your fabric to fit under the machine. This part went relatively smooth, but I was also terrified I’d accidentally sew the whole thing to itself and have to rip seams to try and salvage it, so I was abundantly cautious with the fabric bunching.

9: Binding it was probably the easiest part

Putting the border on was probably my favorite part, possibly because it meant it was almost final, but it was also pretty easy. Just go slow and be careful about your line work.

10: Even if it’s not the prettiest, it goes over well as a gift

My mother-in-law loved it. She didn’t care that it wasn’t perfect, she was excited to get a handmade gift that took so much time.

All in all, I think my younger self would have been stoked that I finished a whole quilt eventually. I’ll likely make another quilt someday, but I’ll definitely approach it with the learnings from the first one.