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How to make a Quilt of Welcome
How to make a Quilt of Welcome
This page has all the information and downloadable resources you need, just read through some initial pointers on style and design, and you are good to go. If you already know what you are doing when it comes to sewing/quilting, scroll straight down to the downloads!
Materials
At a minimum, you will need cotton fabric squares, fabric pens, and a sewing machine (threaded), and some scissors. I would strongly recommend that you only use pure cotton!
If you go for a more complicated quilt block (like the Quilt of Welcome - see next paragraph), then a rotary cutter, a cutting mat, a quilt ruler, and an erasable fabric pen or a pencil will come in handy!
Picking a Design
The easiest route is to buy pre-cut squares, and ask children/people to write on them in fabric pens. In fact, an even easier route is to buy a cotton bed sheet and just write on it as is! If you want to follow the original Quilt of Welcome exactly, then you want to cut (or buy!) two 2.5" squares of fabric per 5" fabric square. Lay these smaller squares over diagonally opposite corners, sew them diagonally, trim the excess fabric (leaving 1/4" margin), and iron. (I'm hoping to make a short video tutorial soon, in the meantime, see the image to the left and above). Drawing the lines with a pencil and a ruler is very helpful!
Some Maths!
The original Quilt of Welcome consists on 396 x 5" squares ("quilt blocks") - specifically, 22 rows of 18 blocks, resulting in a total size of 99"x81", plus the border - roughly 250cmx200cm. The size was not pre-determined, but rather the result of the number of schools/children expressing an interest. When designing your own quilt, your size will likely be determined by the number of quilt blocks you are envisaging, and/or the overall size you are after.
The fact that the Quilt of Welcome quilt blocks are 5" square is not an accident - 5" square is a typical size available to buy pre-cut cotton squares in - and trust me, buying the squares pre-cut makes everything a whole lot easier! If you want an easy life, then pre-cuts are the way to go - you can also get 10" pre-cut cotton squares. If you don't mind the labour of cutting squares yourself, any size goes, but also take into account that people need enough space to write on - many children wrote whole phrases. We asked children to write their words in their home/heritage language, the English translation, and the name of their home/heritage language (with mixed success). Deciding what you want on the squares, and how big you want it, will determine size. This could, incidentally, be a great real-world mathematical opportunity for children - let them work with squares and design different sizes, layouts, etc.
For example, if you are looking to create a Quilt of Welcome for your class, say with 30 children, you might prefer to use 10" blocks, so a 5x6 grid will give you a total quilt size of 47.5"x57" quilt. But wait - isn't 10x5 = 50? Why 47.5?
Seam Allowance - IMPORTANT!
Seam allowance is the term for the amount of fabric that gets "lost" when you stitch two pieces of fabric together. In quilting, a 1/4" seam allowance is pretty much the standard, so a 10" square of fabric will lose a 1/4" all the way round, resulting in a block where 9.5"x9.5" of fabric is visible (and a 5" square piece of fabric will have 4.5" of visible fabric, etc.). This is important not only when it comes to planning the size, but also when explaining to children where to write their words, because if they write too close to the edge, their work will be lost! The downloadable worksheets below have a dashed line to indicate the seam allowance.
Stitching everything together
Once everybody has written on their squares, it is time to stitch everything together. The good news is, because we are dealing with squares, putting the top layer ("quilt top") together is very easy! Start by pairing up squares, laying them together with the writing on both facing each other, and sew (leaving 1/4" seam allowance) one side together. The easiest way to do this is called "chain piecing" - don't bother stopping and re-starting with each pair of squares, just line them up one after the other, and snip them apart later - they'll look a bit like bunting. Older children can absolutely help with this, or parent volunteers. Once you have pairs sewn together, pair them up again, creating groups of four (either in a strip or in a square, depending on design). If you are uncertain about how to do this, I strongly recommend watching a few YouTube tutorials. At the end, all blocks should be connected to each other, forming a square or rectangle, but with raw edges all around the outside.
Quilting and Binding
The quilting itself is actually the process of stitching several layers of fabric together - typically the top layer, a fluffy middle ("wadding"), and backing fabric. Before quilting, the three layers are "basted" together, so that they hold - this can be done with stitches, spray basting, or a small price tagging gun. For the Quilt of Welcome, we built a custom frame that allowed us to keep tension across all three layers, and quilts can be quilted by hand or by machine, or "tied" with knots connecting all layers - again, I suggest you have a look at online tutorials, or work with local volunteers. Strictly speaking, if you intend your Quilt of Welcome to hang on a wall, it doesn't need quilting. Binding refers to sewing fabric all the way around the quilt to secure the edges.
Downloadable Materials
Below are links to three separate worksheets - two are paper versions of the quilt blocks, so children can practise their design. If the whole fabric quilt is too much, you could just ask children to do a paper version, cut them out, and glue them to larger sheets of paper! One paper version is the original QoW with coloured corners, the other is a standard 5" square. The third sheet contains some information around hand quilting, which we had on display during the Festival of Social Science.Â
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