Flannel fabrics are soft and come with pretty patterns in colors we all love, if you love to sew, I’m sure you have made some already some projects and you might have saved all the leftovers from those projects, just because they are so pretty to not to save them, but you might be wondering if you can make a quilt with those scraps of flannel.
Quilting With Flannel For Beginners is a guide to learn more about this fabric, how to prepare it, and how to choose a quilt pattern to make a small or big quilting project with this fabric, you also will find here some tips about how to sew the quilt blocks with this material.
Quilting With Flannel For Beginners
As you keep making more sewing projects, you will use different materials to make them, and flannel will be on your cutting table sooner or later, and the reason is simple, whether you’re making a new pajama for yourself or for your children, flannels are so soft to the touch and cozy, and it comes with pretty patterns, that you can’t skip to make something with this material.
Soon you will have some scraps of flannel and you will be wondering if you can use them to make a quilt top, you might know by now some quilters use flannel as backing of a quilt, but to make a quilt top, this means you will be cutting small pieces of this material, to stitching them together to make one or more quilt tops.
Flannel is a fabric that is made soft and cozy, but it is weave made, and it’s made from natural fibers like cotton, in some cases with wool, and you can also find some low prices options that were made with synthetic fibers. Learning more about this material, will help you to know that it will shrink and it will fray.
How To Prepare Your Flannel To Make A Quilt
Making quilts has been done by quilters around the world for centuries, and quilts have been made using the materials every quilter can get, and this includes flannel.
Pre-Wash The Flannel
Whether you bought the flannel to make a quilt with it, or if you will be using some scraps of this material, it needs to be washed.
It’s important to know that it will shrink and it will fray during the washing cycle, for this reason, you can put all the flannel in a laundry bag with a zipper, this will help to keep the flannel in the bag all the time as well all the fray that comes out of it, and it will make it easier for you to find all those scraps to get them in the dryer.
Set up the laundry machine with a regular cycle, use a mild laundry soap, and set up your laundry machine with hot water, it will help to shrink the flannel.
You can put the flannel in the dryer, or you can put it on the laundry line to dry, it will need to be ironed after it gets dry.
I know, it’s a lot of work, but it’s always better to take your time to do it, to avoid any unpleasant surprise when you wash a finished quilt for the first time.
Quilt Block Patters For Flannel
When choosing a quilt pattern for your next project using flannel, it will work better if you find one that has big size pieces, this will help you to stitch on bigger pieces of this material, and it will easier to sew.
How To Sew On Quilt Blocks With Fannel
As flannel tends to fray, it will be safer to sew on the pieces to make a quilt block with this material with a wider seam allowance, so you will need to cut the pieces bigger that the size recommended for a quilt made with cotton fabrics.
Set up your sewing machine with a straight stitching 3mm or bigger, and use a walking foot, it will help you to feed your sewing machine, with both layers of fabric at the same time.
Follow the same steps to make each quilt block according to the quilt pattern your making, it will work the same as if you were making your new quilt with cotton fabrics.
Press each seam to get better results.
When the top is finished, you can decide to use a flannel fabric for the back or not, and you can decide also to use a batting fabric as a middle layer on your quilt.
Hand Quilting Or Free Motion Quilting On a Quilt Made With Flannel
As flannel is a weave made fabric, if you want to do the quilting by hand, I will suggest making a sample first, as sometimes your stitches will disappear in the weave, or you might need to do bigger stitches.
After making a sample with the flannel you’re using on your quilt, you can decide to hand quilting with regular small stitching or with bigger stitches.
Another option that works good on quilts made with flannel is the Free Motion Quilting on your sewing machine, if you’re new to it, I also recommend making a sample first to see the results before you start working on your quilt.
Closing Thoughts
Flannel is another material quilters can use to make a quilt, but it’s always better to learn more about this material before starting to cut the material for a regular size quilt.
As a quilter, when making a new quilt with a different material, I like to make a small project like a doll quilt, a mug rug, or a mini quilt to see how the material works. If you like the results on a small project, then you can invest your time, work and money to make a regular size quilt with flannel.
