How we make quilts

We really like how our quilts have turned out but we're more excited about making room for people with different levels of experience, skill, and time that they can contribute. We've chosen a technique that is easy to parallelize for most of the process. We focus on patterns that are easy to explain to new people and use a couple techniques that become mechanical fairly quickly leaving space for lots of conversation. We're also moving more toward patterns that illustrate math that is accessible to students who are debating about being math majors.

Quilt making on this scale is a pretty inexpensive project - much less expensive than 3d printing, our other visualization medium. You want at least $100 to start with - this would cover essential supplies and fabric for a quilt. I think we've spent less than $300 on all of our supplies and we've made four quilts and have most supplies on hand for many more. The biggest expense is fabric - spend your money on nice fabrics and worry less about the quality of all the other stuff.

Supplies

Our supplies

The picture above is our (non fabric) supplies. Starting from the top:

We store all of our stuff in plastic shoe boxes. They are pretty small, but we don't actually need that many things.
The big gray thing everything is resting on is a self healing mat. You use it with the rotary cutter (a pizza cutter for fabric in the middle) to make lots of really easy straight cuts. It is not necessary when just starting but nice to have.
We have so many pairs of scissors. You could get nice scissors but these were just cast offs gathered from the department and they are definitely good enough.
We have a really big translucent ruler. This is only really helpful if you have a rotary cutter and self healing mat.
Freezer paper can be ironed on to fabric to form an easy to remove attachment. You can also use copy paper and pin it on. (This is a matter of preference. The students really like the freezer paper.)
The box of tailors chalk is to temporarily mark on the fabric. This is another second round purchase.
Thread! This picture is really unrepresentative of the quantity of thread we go through. There are lots of choice of thread but we use white all purpose thread for every step.
The silver circle is a magnetic dish we use as a pin cushion. (It comes from the hardware section because it was functionally equivalent and half the price of the version intended for sewing.) It contains straight pins, needles, and paper clips.
A seam ripper. You are going to make mistakes and they are easier to deal with using a seam ripper but you could also use sharp scissors.
Straight pins. We actually use very few of these, but there really isn't anything else that does the job.
Iron (and small ironing board). These are mostly to attach freezer paper to fabric so if you are using copy paper you can probably skip it. We often end up with wrinkly fabric so it can be helpful to iron before we start sewing.

The important thing missing from these pictures is the packaging from the needles, but I think we just started with an envelope of 50ish assorted sewing needles.

So to recap:

Necessary supplies: thread, needles, pins, scissors, ruler

Basting pins

Early second purchase: basting pins! These look a lot like safety pins, but then are a little bent and this makes them so much easier to use. You won't need them until it is time to assemble all the layers of the quilt.
Nice to have: everything else

One really important thing not on this list - a sewing machine. I often use a sewing machine for final assembly but it would just get in the way earlier in the process since it would make everything less communal and get in the way of conversation. (It also really isn't essential for final assembly.)

Fabric

We use high quality quilting cotton. This is kind of a matter of taste but I find a really significant difference in nicer fabric. We use Kona cotton and it costs about $10 a yard. We mostly buy it in unspecified assortments of bright colors by the pound on etsy. This means we have a bunch of fabric on hand and we can make decisions about color with the fabrics in front of us. (We sometimes end up with a few ugly colors but it is worth it.) The picture below is most of our current stash.

Warm and cool colors

We haven't needed more than 1/4 of yarn of most colors. Exceptions are situations like the multiples of 2 in our prime divisor quilt. In that case we just bought 2 yards of approximately the color we wanted.

When we are working on a quilt we keep those fabric in a separate plastic shoebox since we sometimes need to find them again. I'm writing this as we are working on our symmetric group quilt and those fabrics are below.

Fabric for the symmetric group quilt

We've been sticking entirely with solid fabrics since it seems to give us greater flexibility in design.

Missing from these pictures is batting. So far we've used low loft cotton batting. It is easy to work with and inexpensive.

Process

We make our quilts using English paper piecing. This is a method of precisely assembling quilts by hand. It isn't a fast process but it is really great for producing beautiful quilts. While it is helpful to have one person who knows a little more about the process, most of the effort uses a couple easy to master skills that people can easily teach soon after they learn them. It is an ideal activity to accompany conversation.

Below I've outlined the process we use. Our process is a little idiosyncratic since our goal isn't only a really lovely product. I expect that this isn't an exhaustive tutorial, but maybe it can help you navigate the many tutorials available.

Also - I'm writing this during the covid pandemic, so the tutorial is just one pair of hands (occasionally out of the center of the frame!). This is really not what we're aiming for - it ideally looks more like these pictures.

To give a sense of how we assemble our quilts I made a 8in by 8in quilt of the Cayley table of the Klein four group. There is a time lapse video of the process above and I'll describe the steps below. You may want more details on various steps and I encourage you to look around for tutorials on english paper piecing.

Front of the little quilt (potholder!)

Back of the little quilt
You can see the knots that hold the layers together more easily from the back.

First a comment about design. The first quilt we made had round edges and concave pieces. This is certainly a thing you can do, but we've since switched to square pieces. This makes it a lot easier to work in parallel with many people of varying experience. We've also found that about 2in squares are a good size - they are small enough to make manageable quilts but also big enough for beginners.

Cut out copy paper or freezer paper for each of the pieces you need.
Cutting the backing paper

They should be the final size of the pieces you want. You want these to be accurate, but we can usually work with error of 1/8in or less.
Copy paper or freezer paper is a matter of choice. If you use copy paper you will pin fabric to them before you tack them together. If you use freezer paper you will iron them on.
This step and the next are really great places to (first) involve people who are not excited about working with a needle yet.

Cut out fabric about 1 in larger that your paper pieces.
Cutting the fabric
The finished square will be two inches wide and the strip is three inches.

Many of the squares I made for this project were a little smaller than that and they were harder to work with.
For this project I also cut the binding now. This is 2 1/4 in fabric strips that I ironed in half. For a longer project I would put this step off to the end.
Cutting a 2 1/4in strip for binding.

If you are using freezer paper, iron it on the fabric.
Ironing
It would be nice if this fabric was a little bigger.

Also LABEL at this point! We make sure to have many copies of the pattern around where all colors are assigned a number.
We also start to divide the pieces into sets of about twenty at this point. When we were working on our prime divisors quilt we divided into 5 by 5 squares. (It is much easier to work with roughly square subsets of the quilt than something like a 1 by 30 subset of the quilt.)

Tack the edges of the fabric around the paper.
Tacking

Make sure the fabric is folded tightly around the edge of the paper - the 1/8in manageable error range still holds here.
Sew about every 1in sew through both layers of fabric and the paper. I go through each stitch twice to help keep the fabric in place and I don't bother to knot the threat at the beginning or the end.
If you are using copy paper pin the paper in the center of the fabric. Remove the pin after the fabric is tacked into place.
Pinning copy paper in place
Conveniently this is a good step to introduce sewing to people not so familiar with a needle. These stitches will be taken out at the end, and that seems to be a big selling point for people who want to help but don't feel comfortable with their work being visible at the end.

Assemble the blocks.

I use a whip stitch to attach pieces and mine are usually about 1/8in apart. You don't need to catch more than a little bit of the fabric with each stitch.
Whip stitch
We see a lot of variation in size of distance and stitches at this point and that is just fine.
I assemble my blocks on a diagonal - I want to minimize knots since those are the weak points.

Cut out backing fabric.

At this point the process can't really be done in parallel and so I usually just take over the process from the group. Happily most of the work is done even though the steps aren't!

Cutting backing fabric

You want the backing fabric to be a couple inches bigger on all sides than the top of the quilt to give yourself room to work. In a little "quilt" like this I gave myself about an inch on all sides. In a larger quilt I'd give myself a couple inches on either side.

Remove backing paper.
Removing the paper

The quilt looks pretty different after you remove the backing paper. In the picture below, the backing paper has been removed on the right and remains on the left.
Half the paper is removed!

Tape the backing fabric so there are no wrinkles.
Taping out the backing fabric

If you quilt is wider than about 38in you are probably going to need to sew two pieces of fabric together. This is easiest to do with a sewing machine.
Really do tape it out tightly.
This is a place where I think it ok to use less expensive fabric - no one will see it and you won't be working with it much.

Place batting on top of the backing fabric. Top with the assembled blocks.
Stacking the quilt layers

Just like with the backing fabric you want the batting to be a little bigger than the quilt top. I'm only giving myself an inch or so on either side and that wouldn't be nearly enough for a bigger quilt.
I also usually use cotton batting for the lab quilts, but this quilt is using wool since that is what I had on hand. (I was willing to venture to the math lab for supplies for this project but not to a store.)

Use the basting pins to pin all the layers together. You want to a pin about every 10 inches. (Mine are much closer than this since this quilt is so tiny.)
Pin basting

While you can't see it, I'm using the slightly bent basting pins here.

Tie the layers together.
Tying the layers together

The ties should be about 6 to 10 in apart - the batting should come with directions on this.
Finished adding four ties
You can replace the ties with machine quilting. This is how I handle most of our quilts, but it is more complicated than tying the quilt. It requires a sewing machine and someone who is either experienced or willing to fight with the machine.

Sew the binding fabric to the edge.
Attaching the binding

Match the raw edges of the folded over binding with the edge of the quilt top. Sew about 1/4in from the raw edge.
Normally I would do this step with a sewing machine, but in the interest of making this project entirely hand sewn I used a backstitch here. (I have no idea if that is the right stitch for this application, but it is strong.)
I think I learned about this from Purl Soho.

Trim the backing fabric and batting so they are same size as the quilt top.
Removing the extra fabric and batting

I'm always sad to have scrap at this step, but it so much better than not having enough backing or batting.

Attach triangles to the top corners.
Sewing on triangles to hang the quilt

This is an optional step, but they are a good way to hang the quilt. This quilt is so small they are a little ridiculous.
On some of our quilts I will add triangles to all corners since I'm not sure which side we will want to have as the top.
If you are making a big quilt you probably want to replace this with a sleeve for a dowel.

Fold the binding over and sew in place. I use a slip stitch for this step.
Finishing the binding
Done!

University of Kentucky Math Lab

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