Making a Wholecloth Quilt

I recently received an email from Wendy in Michigan - she had not found anything about designing or marking wholecloth quilts and wondered if I could point her in the right direction with some books. I am sharing my reply with you, in case it might be of use.....

Dear Wendy,

Yes, wholecloths are a bit specialised!!

For Welsh quilts you could try Making Welsh Quilts by Mary Jenkins and Clare Claridge. Also the book by Marjorie Horton on Welsh Quilting Pattern & Design Handbook (self published??) more on designing tho than the actual how to mark and make up.

For Durham and Welsh full size templates and patterns - try the following:
Diana Lodge - Quilting - Traditional Needle Arts- Mitchell Beazley has both Welsh and Durham quilts also Sanderson Star pattern.
Also try Essential Quilting Project Book by Barbara Chainey - also has full size templates including Sanderson Star, Welsh and Durham strippy quilts.

There is also Amy Emms' Story of Durham Quilting - instructions a bit sparse but OK if you know what you're doing....

Also Dorothy Osler's British Quilts has instructions for a strippy.

The old method would have involved sitting down at the frame and using templates on the cloth - marking around them with chalk or needle marking and filling in the rest freehand; the modern method would involve making a paper pattern (either with hand drafted patterns or using the computer) and then tracing this onto the fabric with a light table. In the course that I took on wholecloth quilts, we used the paper method where you draw/design a quarter pattern of the centre medallion, then a quarter of an outer border - use these to mark the whole quilt top and finally adding the infill diamond hatching (using a separate sheet of diamonds to mark where necessary).

There are several books on the hand quilting stitch but apart from looking at old quilts it would be hard to describe designing a wholecloth.

The above books are mostly out of print but you can get them at the library or from Amazon or Abe books or other online sellers that sell used books.

Hope that helps

Pippa