Decipher Your Quilt

Earlier this month when I mentioned I was thinking of running a series on quilt calculations, my friend Leanne said she had been thinking along the same lines and asked if I'd be interested in running it together. Obviously my answer was yes, so I'm excited to announce we are teaming up for our Decipher Your Quilt series. Emails have been flying back and forth, and we have come up with a plan we're really excited about - hopefully lots of you will be too!

What we will be trying to do during this series is to give you the skills to look at a quilt and be able to pick out the blocks it is constructed from, and to draft and manipulate the size of those blocks to your needs. We will be discussing different types of blocks and quilts (such as 4 patch blocks, 9 patch blocks, tessellating patterns, hexagons etc) and how to identify what category a particular block falls into. We will also talk through some of the calculations that relate to each block type (such as how to choose a good block size, and how to calculate what sized fabric pieces you will need.) By understanding these things, we hope to give you the confidence to adapt different quilt blocks to your needs, whether it be re-sizing a block or drafting a block entirely from scratch. It will involve some calculations and maths-type stuff, but we hope to present it in a way that makes it easy to understand. 

You can have a look at the schedule we have come up with here, but it is very flexible so if you have particular things you would like us to discuss, please fill in our questionnaire and let us know. We would like to target the information we present to what you want to know, so if you have difficulty with quilt maths we would really appreciate you taking the time to fill it out. We will be running an anonymous 'Dear Abbey'-type question and answer section throughout the series, and there is a section in the questionnaire aimed at this if you have a particular query you would like answered. 

We have also started a Flickr group, where you are welcome to ask questions or to show off blocks you might make during the series. If you are on Instagram and make anything using our tutorials through the series you would like to share, please use the hashtag #decipheryourquilt. 

We will be posting on each of these topics each Thursday for the next few months, but we are both happy to extend it further if need be. I've created a page, which I will update with links to each of the tutorial posts as they become available, and I will add links to resources like graph paper and other useful tools over time. 

We are really excited about this, and hope you will join us :o)

xx Jess