Quilting

The book I read to research this post was Quilting for Dummies by Cheryl Hall which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. The art of quilting is very old, the oldest quilted object found to date was dated to 1BC & was found in a tomb in siberia. The applications of quilting are equally widespread, it can be used for table runners, objects which you hang on the wall, coat hangers even in the old days a door might be quilted or even a whole tent especially in colder climates. In medieval times when you wore armour part of your protection was the thickly quilted material. Most quilted objects have 3 layers, there's the backing, the batting or the filling & the top quilt layer which if it's decorated this is called appliquee. Quilting can be done by hand or on a sewing machine, often nowadays the appliquee is machine done.Cotton is most commonly used for the top & bottom layers because it's relatively easy to get a needle threw it, the batting on the other hand is often polyester or cotton/polyester composite. The reason for this is that polyester doesn't shrink much when it's wet & it's good for keeping you warm. If you are quilting clothing some people use silk batting because it's lightweight but it's very expensive & difficult to source. Polyester is quite unsuitable for the top or backing layers in quilting, it's difficult to push a needle threw & you will end up with sore fingers. That brings us to another point always use a thimble on the middle finger of the right hand if you are right handed & the left hand if you are left handed. You should use tailors chalk for marking out your designs as it's readily water soluble & easy to wash off. You should use proper fabric scissors & keep them sharp by only using them to cut fabric, don't waste money getting them sharpened instead buy a new pair. In the old days they used to have quilting bees where women meet up & show each other what they were quilting, nowadays there are quilting guilds which sometimes even get an expert on a certain aspect of quilting in to do a talk, there's also cyber guilds on the internet.