What are Quilting Kits?

Quilting is the craft of stitching pieces of fabric together to form a patterned bed quilt or other quilted household item. Quilting kits are packaged sets of materials to use to make one quilted project. Quilting kits typically include a pattern, instructions and pre-cut fabrics. Most kits don't include thread, batting and quilt backing.

Quilting kits are available in many different styles and types of projects. For example, a Western quilt kit is likely to include fabrics with horse, hats and boot prints. A more traditional quilting kit often has more mainstream prints such as flowers and stripes. Although there are many kits for making quilts, there are still many other quilting kits available for projects such as rugs, wall hangings, stuffed animals, pillows and table runners.

Most quilting kits are marked with the suggested skill level. A quilting kit designed for beginners may be a good choice for the beginner who doesn't feel comfortable coordinating fabric patterns yet. It's definitely a good idea to start with a small quilting kit project such as a wall hanging before tackling the first full-size quilt. Quilting kits for advanced quilters often contain many different fabric colors. The patterns are often very intricate and may contain complex nature scenes with advanced stitches required to complete the effect.

Traditional piecing quilting kits include fabrics to be pieced in quilt blocks before sewing the blocks together to make the complete quilt. A quilting kit may be designed for hand sewing or for machine sewing. A foundation piecing or paper piecing, quilting kit is made to have the fabric pieces sewn onto a fabric or paper foundation piece. The foundation could be permanent or temporary.

Hand sewing quilting projects may take longer than using a sewing machine, but the benefit is you can take separate quilt blocks with you to work on anywhere. In the machine quilting method, you may gain speed but are likely to be limited to working only where your sewing machine is. An alternative to buying quilting kits is to buy jelly rolls only. In quilting, a jelly roll is a rolled-up collection of coordinating strips of fabric. The standard size of the strips is 2 1/2 inches (6. 35 cm). One jelly roll may make a wall hanging or other small project, while a quilt may take two or more jelly rolls.