Homemade Quilts

If you know how easy it is to make quilts at home, you won't feel the need to buy them, and instead would love to make them yourself. Homemade quilts can be made in a variety of patterns, practically with any piece of cloth around, as long as it is strong enough to handle some wear and tear. Various kinds of fabric can transform your quilts into designer pieces. For example, cloth like satin or georgette are the best. And if you are good with thread and needles, some embroidery would certainly enable you to put up the quilts for sale. Various quilting designs are given in the following paragraphs under subheads of different patterns.

Ideal for making homemade baby quilts, this one is very easy to make and will turn out to be very comfortable too. For that, select some old bed sheets that has somewhat lost its color or which you cannot use anymore due to some cuts or stains, etc. You can use these bed sheets or Turkish or bath towels to make this quilt. But ensure that you repair the cuts in the sheets by stitching them up by sewing the ends, for giving it strength.

After you are done with this, all you got to do is decide what size do you want your quilt to be and then cut the sheets accordingly. But an important point here is to cut as minimum as possible. Now how you do that? Well, it easy. Just try to see whether you can make do without cutting the extra long bed sheet or the double bed sheet. In such cases you can just fold them up and may be then you can cut out some part that cannot be adjusted evenly. All these things are to be done while spreading the sheets out on the floor.

The best thing about anything that is homemade is that you can totally customize it. Likewise, making a homemade quilt gives you the freedom of deciding the thickness of your homemade quilt apart from selecting baby size, queen size, twin type, etc. The next step is stitching up the sheets together with long running stitches all along the borders and diagonally too. Then leaving reasonable gap, depending on the total size and outline of the quilt, repeat the long running stitches.

Your skeleton of the quilt is ready. Now to make it attractive and complete, you have to invest a bit in a cloth to put a cover on the entire quilt. You may either go in for cotton for good quality satin or velvet to, if you like. You can select two different cloths for the upper and inner side of the quilt too. While you are stitching up the cover to the quilt, one last bit of finishing touch is to take long strip of cloth of giving the quilt a border, as shown in the picture above. There you go!

The basic steps and quilt making instructions remain the same as mentioned in the above section. The following paragraphs will give you various patters you can opt for, in making your own quilts.

Checkered Patterns: Using applique quilting technique you can make this design. Now by saying checkered I do not only mean the small checks with the classic white and black combination. The size of the checks can vary and so can the colors according to your liking. As far as colors are concerned I would suggest to go with your bedroom wall color or the furniture. Again, depending on your liking you can either go in for contrast colors or something that offers a monotone theme.

Flower Designs: Flower designs on bed sheets are common and can be used by either of the genders as long as the color too remains a unisex choice.

Borders: This is a very plain and simple pattern with border along the side of the quilt and the rest being absolutely plain. You can go for bright colors or strips of satin or any other material for having variety. Choosing a single color will give the quilt an elegant look.

Embroidery: This is especially for the kids. Kids love designs and colorful cartoon characters more as compared to plain printed cloth. So you can make simple outline sketch using various types and color of thread of your child's favorite cartoon figure or cute little animals like the rabbit, panda, ducks, etc.

Patch Work: This is an applique pattern which you can experiment with either using a same cut piece of cloth, alternating two pieces or take various pieces and then make a random design out of it.

Center Design: Contrary to the border style, this will ideally have only one design at the center. It can of course be combined with some border. But if quilting has suddenly caught your fancy fearing your patience might run out, going in for this design is a good idea.

A fantastic idea and quilt pattern for beginners for homemade window quilts is to use strips of net or laces and alternatively join them with embossed cloth strips.

Other very popular patterns for homemade quilts are the double wedding ring quilt, cottage quilts, mosaic patterns, wedding ring quilt pattern, etc. As the name suggests, mosaic basically needs patch and applique work, and cottage again is square patches of cloth, cut in equal dimensions and put together. So you can use these too. Now that you know how to make a quilt, hope this article motivates you and gives you enthusiasm to experiment this yourself.