Picture Quilts

From LoveToKnow Crafts

Picture quilts are tactile scrapbooks. They use the power of your ink jet printer to craft one-of-a-kind textile art that can make a remarkable gift or decorative showpiece. Picture quilts don’t have to languish on beds or the backs of couches either. Photo quilts make impressive wall hangings, placemats and table runners that are manageable projects even a beginning sewer can tackle easily.

Basic Picture Quilts

Picture quilts can be made with either iron on transfers or special fabric that’s printed using an ink jet printer and the photo images of your choice. Both methods create images on fabric that can be pieced into a quilt.

Printer Fabric Quilts

Printer fabric is typically sold in either 8 ½” x 11” sheets that will pass easily through a standard color printer or as a combination of ingredients that can be added to ready-to-dye fabric to stiffen it and make it receptive to printer dye.

Once loaded, printer fabric is sent through an ink jet printer just like a piece of standard printer paper. Typically, the newly printed fabric will be set to make it color fast and rinsed to remove extra chemicals or residual dye. After that, it can be washed normally.

Iron On Transfer Quilts

You can also make picture quilts using iron on photo transfers. This process also uses your printer. The transfers can be ironed onto the fabric or fabrics of your choice. This is a flexible way to get images onto preprinted fabric, but the resulting transfers can be bulky and feel rubbery.

Choosing Images

You can use custom software to handle printing on fabric, or just use your regular photo handling software. The process of selecting, sizing, and printing the images will be similar to the process used to print photos onto quality photo paper.

The artistry is in selecting the right image or images to compliment the design you have in mind for your picture quilt. You will probably be printing on multiple sheets of fabric or transfer paper from a collection of related photos. With fabric paper, you can also split an image into parts and print pieces that you can then sew back together. Using this method, you can create larger images than the standard sized 8 ½” x 11” printer paper sheet.

Creating the Quilt

Although these methods are very different, they can both be used to create one-of-a-kind picture quilts using traditional quilting techniques. Quilting is the process of assembling smaller sections of fabric into a larger piece using a variety of seaming techniques and patterns.

Once assembled, this decorative portion of the quilt is called the top. The top is then placed on a piece of filler or batting and a third layer of fabric is added to the back to make a quilt “sandwich”. The three layer sandwich is then stitched across its surface in an overall pattern to keep the filler from shifting.

To finish the quilt, a narrow band of fabric is sewn around the four sides, folded over the raw edges, and stitched in place.

Tips and Tricks

Make a balanced picture quilt, by using a variety of light and dark colors distributed evenly throughout the design.

To make the pieces come together easily, decide on a standard size for each segment. A square is an easy shape to work with. If all the squares are the same size, it will be simple to seam them together into a finished top.

Avoid making a quilt that looks too busy by adding blocks that have no photos but are a complimentary color. This will give the viewer’s eye a place to rest and make your quilt more cohesive.

Add interest to your quilt with some additional decorative elements, like buttons, ribbon and beads. This will give your quilt depth and help hold the batting in place.

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