Quilting Terminology Made Easy

Quilting Terminology Made Easy
Hi! I am Shelly Cordsen from Expert Village.com. We are doing beginning quilting and there is a world of terminology out there for quilters. So I am going to just go over a few that are pretty commonly used all the time. When you go into a quilt store, you are going to buy fabric and I just learned last night that the word material is not used very often anymore. It is always fabric. You will find it on a bolt. It is normally 44-45 inches wide and that would be from salvage to salvage and in a lot of cases you have to piece that in order to get enough for back of a quilt but this is a pretty standard. There are fabrics out there 108 wide but most stores you go to this is what you are going to find 44 inches wide. Okay, fat quarter. You always hear people say go get your fat quarter. Okay, a fat quarter. All a fat quarter is that you take a yard of fabric which is your 36 inches by 44 wide; we have already talked about that. You fold that in half and that in half which gives you an 18 x 22 that is called a fat quarter and there is a lot of quilts out there that are called fat quarter quilts that you make the whole quilt with nothing but fat quarters. In yours stores, you will find them in stacks such as this, all color coordinated, some of them do fancy folds, you can even buy them individually as you need them and the baby quilt that we will be making you will be using two fat quarters and so you will get you are handed a full bolt of fabric along with fat quarters. Another term we will see a lot is a quarter inch. Most quilts are done using a quarter inch seam allowance. So as we see here you can sew along and your seam allowance here is a quarter inch. It is nice if you take your ruler and see that and if you hear the words scant quarter inch that is just about one more thread in and it is just a shy of a quarter inch and in some cases you will hear them say use a scant quarter inch and that is what you will need. Another term we use a lot is salvage. When you are folding your fabric you will hear me say a lot that a lot that is the top edge of your fabric usually has little dots in it. It has color codes in it such as this one has telling you what threads are in the fabric, I would use a lot, fold your fabric salvage to salvage that is what that this. Now let’s begin quilting.