Making Wooden Quilts

Do you like quilts and quilt-making? Do you enjoy natural wood crafts or woodworking? Then you have come to the right place. This is Quilts in Wood, where quilt-making and woodworking collide.

Now, that may seem a little odd. Quilts are soft, and comforting. Wood is hard, unbending. On cold winter nights, we sleep under a lovely quilt made by our daughter-in-law, but a wooden quilt might be just a little uncomfortable. I don’t think we’d get much sleep.

The Wooden Quilter

Visit “Meet the Wooden Quilter” to learn how this all got started.

So how do we combine quilts with wood?
That might depend on what makes a quilt a quilt.

Is it the sandwich of pieced top, batting, and backing?

I’ve heard it said that if the piece is “Tied” with loops of yarn, rather than stitched, it’s a “comforter” and not a quilt.

Is it the often intricate stitching that holds the sandwich together?

That is often called the “Quilting”, and the special machines that sew many of those patterns are called “Quilting Machines” or “Long-arm Quilters”.

Or is it the carefully pieced quilt top?

When you go to the quilt-shop and buy a book of quilt patterns, what you are after is the traditional craft of taking small pieces of different fabrics and arranging them in new ways to create art with cloth.

Maybe it’s all of those, or any of them.

But to me, the distinctive that makes it a quilt is the pattern. That’s what captures our attention at the shows. We’ll admire the stitching, wonder at the selection of fabrics, but it is how those pieces are put together to create a completely new look, with colors that complement or contrast…..that’s what makes it the quilt that we “ooh” and “aah” at.

We go to the quilt shop, or subscribe to one of the many magazines or blogs, and what we look at first are the patterns, those beautiful, artful creations made by cutting fabric apart and piecing it back together.

What if we took pieces of wood, with their great variety of colors and grain patterns, and put them together to create some of the intriguing patterns we see in the quilts we love?

Would that qualify as a Quilt in Wood?

This wooden sampler quilt is 30″ by 66″, and hangs on the wall of a friend’s sewing room not far from our home.

That is what I do. And that is exactly what this site is about. We want to build a community of quilt-lovers, and see how we can do quilt-making with wood (and possibly other odd things).

We’ll have some “how-to” pages.

And picture galleries.

We want news about your quilt guilds and shows.

And we’ll share ideas about innovative quilting, especially in non-traditional materials—like wood.

We will, hopefully, throw in a few woodworking projects that might not be quilt patterns, but are quilt related, like quilt racks, or unique sewing tables or quilting frames—for those who still want to do their quilting the old-fashioned way, or.…whatever.

I will share how I make quilts in wood, and I hope we will all share what we are working on.

And maybe we’ll meet some day at a quilt show somewhere.

So please come back, again and again.

We’re just getting started with this family, so look regularly for new features, like picture galleries, and lists of up-coming shows, and good stuff like that.

Hope to see you soon.

Grampa Ben, the wooden quilter.