A PRINTED ZINE:

Printed in beautiful risograph in Seattle (by Amelia!), it makes a wonderful gift, or a special and beautiful addition to your sewing library.

INSTANT DOWNLOAD:

A printable zine with instructions for how to print and bind it yourself at home. Also includes a digital file to view on any device. Start quilting today! 

We’re including instructions for each step of the process so that if you can sew a straight line, you can make a whole quilt.

That’s always one of our biggest priorities for sewing patterns at All Well – it’s our goal to teach and guide from experience, hand you all of the tools and advice you need to feel confident as you begin, and create designs that are versatile and give you lots of space for your own brilliant creativity. And once you learn the techniques used in this pattern, you can really make any kind of quilt you’d like! The world’s your quilt oyster!

We'll walk you through, step by step!

Fabric & Notions

Patchwork looks and feels best with a combination of fabrics that are all the same relative weight and fiber content. For example, we don’t recommend mixing wool with linen with cotton with silk in various weights – though unique, that would be an unruly and difficult quilt to sew! Whether you’re using new, secondhand, or scrap fabric, keep this in mind when you’re choosing what you’d like! Mid-weight 100% cotton is the most common fabric for patchwork, but you’re not limited to that. Just know that other fabrics like linen or synthetics may be more shifty or slippery or otherwise difficult to use. 

Quilting cotton quite literally comes in every hue you can imagine. If you’re looking to buy new fabric, we recommend Robert Kaufman’s Kona Cotton Solids, a brand used by many quilters. Your local fabric store probably carries a rainbow of colors of quilting cotton in both solids and prints!

Keep in mind that you definitely don’t need to use brand-new fabric! Try checking the linens sections of local thrift stores or seeing if your community has a creative reuse or crafting secondhand store. Quilts are an extremely common and time-tested way to use fabric scraps – just make sure that you have enough scraps to cut the amount of squares you’ll need. Cutting squares from irregularly shaped scraps will take a little longer than cutting from fresh yardage, but the extra time is worth it to give new life to fabric that otherwise might not have a use! (The zine also has a Scrap Strategy section for some of our best tips for working from scraps!)

You’ll also need batting, backing, binding fabric and some other supplies. The zine has many pages of tips and detail inside!

Color Palettes

It can be fun to use markers to sketch different color palettes. Here are some from Amy’s notebook. You can download and print a coloring sheet to play with your own ideas.

(Note: The coloring sheet is included with your digital download and with the risograph printed zine, too!)

A quilt is a commitment. You will spend money, and you will spend a lot of time. Trust me when I say -- it’s worth it. The process of making a quilt is the kind of process that can carry you if you let it. There are moments of logic and clarity,  and moments of improvisation and creativity. There’s machine work and hand work. (The zine teaches machine quilting, and also hand-quilting — here’s a video of the technique!) There are opportunities to make your quilt your own at every turn. If you are an absolute beginner to sewing,  a quilt is actually an excellent way to learn so many of the techniques that translate to making all sorts of things! And if sewing is old-hat to you, here’s a nice long project to really relax into. 

This quilt design in particular is construction-wise super simple but still visually dynamic and complex. It’s an excellent first quilt project – and if you use this same pattern multiple times over the years with different color schemes, the finished quilts look fantastically unique and singular.

More warmth, for everyone!