Quilting and Handwork

A quilt is three layers held together, and everything hard about making one comes from the fact that those layers must be cut true, joined true, and kept flat while you work. This course teaches that accuracy from the beginning. You will learn what the parts of a quilt are actually called and what each one does; how to cut squares and strips that are the size you meant them to be, with a rotary cutter kept sharp, closed, and respected; how to sew the quarter-inch seam that every pieced block depends on, and how to test yours rather than trust it. From there you build blocks, join them with sashing, and add borders that lie flat instead of ruffling - which is a measuring problem, not a sewing problem, and the course shows you why.

The middle of the course covers the layers and the quilting itself: choosing batting by fiber and loft, piecing a backing, and basting a sandwich that will not shift. You will learn hand quilting - the rocking stitch, needle and thread choices, hoops and frames, and how to bury a knot - and machine quilting, with walking-foot straight lines and free-motion work, including the setup and practice that make free-motion possible on an ordinary home machine. Then you finish a piece properly: squaring up, making and applying continuous bias or straight-grain binding, mitering corners, closing the join, and finishing the back by hand. The last two units turn to embroidery - the foundation stitches, hoops, floss and stabilizers - and then to putting that needlework onto clothing, pillowcases, towels and table linens, where it belongs on things that get used.

The course is ten units of ten lessons, one hundred lessons in all, self-paced, each lesson a short reading followed by a ten-question quiz that grades itself. It is written for an adult with some sewing behind her - someone comfortable at a machine who wants to work at a higher standard, often on a budget, often making things that will be slept under and worn out. Throughout it returns to the character Scripture attaches to this kind of work: the women in Exodus who did spin with their hands and brought what they had made, Bezalel and Aholiab filled with the Spirit in all manner of workmanship, the virtuous woman who layeth her hands to the spindle and is not afraid of the snow for her household, and Dorcas, whose coats and garments were held up and wept over because she had made them for somebody. Where a lesson touches on clothing the body, modesty is taught warmly, as a positive good and a kindness to others, never as a rule list. Patience, honest measurement, finishing what you start, and doing it heartily as to the Lord are the themes this course keeps coming back to, because they are also what makes a quilt last a hundred years.