THE PARTS OF A QUILT

Here is some basic terminology of quilting:

Blocks: Blocks are the uniformly square pieces of cloth that can be unadorned or decorated using a variety of sewing techniques and other pieces of cloth. Several blocks are pieced together, usually by sewing machine, to form a quilt top.

Quilt Top: Big queen-sized quilts are ever popular, and it can take as many as 20 or more blocks pieced together to create the proper size quilt top. A quilt top looks like a big sheet and has no stitching on it other than the seams that piece the blocks together.

Sandwiching: Sandwiching is the assembly of the various layers of a quilt: the top; the middle, made of cotton or poly-fill batting; and the back, which is usually a cotton fabric. Some quilting guilds have basting frames, upon which they can stretch the quilt taut, with cotton batting and backing. The layers are then basted together with long stitches every few inches to keep the fabric from shifting. Other quilters simply lay the layers of material on the floor, stretch them tight and tape them to the floor before making their basting stitches.

Quilting: This is the really time consuming part of the craft. Quilting is the tiny, even, stitching that is done, usually by hand, to hold the layers of batting and fabric together and to give the work a padded look. The intricate stitching adds just as much, if not more, to the design and art of the piece as the scheme of the blocks. Quilters use a variety of frames to keep their work taut and quilt on small sections at a time. To quilt a queen-size comforter could easily take more than a year.