Quilting Vocabulary in English — 20 Essential Terms

A quilt is essentially a fabric sandwich made of three layers. The top is the decorative, patterned surface, usually made by sewing many small pieces of fabric together. The batting (also called wadding) is the soft middle layer that gives the quilt its warmth and padded texture; it can be cotton, polyester, wool, or a blend. The backing is the plain fabric on the underside. These three layers are stacked together and then stitched through with the quilting itself, which holds them permanently in place and creates the characteristic quilted texture.

A fat quarter is a popular way of buying small amounts of fabric. A normal quarter-yard is cut as a long, narrow strip across the full width of the fabric, which is awkward for cutting patchwork pieces. A fat quarter instead takes a half-yard and cuts it in half down the middle, producing a piece that contains the same total amount of fabric but in a fatter, more usable roughly square shape. This makes it far easier to cut larger blocks and a wider variety of shapes, which is why fat quarters are sold in coordinated bundles and are a favourite among quilters.

In quilting, almost all piecing is done with a seam allowance of exactly one quarter of an inch — the margin between your stitching and the raw edge of the fabric. This standard exists because a quilt top is made of many small pieces that must add up to precise measurements. If your seam allowance is even slightly too wide or too narrow, the error multiplies across dozens of seams, so blocks end up the wrong size and refuse to line up with their neighbours. Many quilters use a special quarter-inch presser foot to keep this measurement consistent throughout a project.

These are two distinct stages in making a quilt. Piecing is the process of sewing small fabric pieces together to build up the blocks and the decorative quilt top. Quilting — in the narrow sense — is the later stage of stitching through all three layers (top, batting, and backing) to hold them together and add surface texture and pattern. So you first piece the top, then layer it with batting and backing, and finally quilt the whole sandwich, either by hand, on a domestic machine, or on a large long-arm machine. The word ‘quilting’ is also used loosely to mean the entire craft.

A half-square triangle, often abbreviated to HST, is one of the most useful building blocks in patchwork. It is a square made from two right-angled triangles of different fabrics, joined along their longest (diagonal) edge. Because the resulting square has a clear diagonal line of colour, half-square triangles can be rotated and arranged in countless ways to create stars, zigzags, pinwheels, arrows, and many other designs. Quilters often make them in batches using efficient methods that produce two, four, or eight units at once, which is why they appear in so many patterns.

The log cabin is one of the oldest and best-loved traditional quilt blocks. It is built by sewing strips of fabric — the ‘logs’ — one after another around a small central square, working outward in a spiral. The central square is traditionally red or yellow to represent the hearth or fire of a cabin. A classic feature of the log cabin is that one half of the block uses light fabrics and the other half dark, so that when many blocks are arranged together they can form dramatic patterns of light and shadow. It is popular with beginners because it uses only simple straight strips.

A rotary cutter is a handheld tool with a sharp, rolling circular blade, used together with a self-healing cutting mat and a thick clear ruler. It transformed quilting because it allows you to cut long, perfectly straight strips and accurate shapes through several layers of fabric at once, far faster and more precisely than scissors. Since accurate cutting is the foundation of accurate piecing, the rotary cutter has become an essential tool. It is also extremely sharp, so quilters are careful to retract or close the blade whenever it is not in use.

A walking foot is a special attachment for a sewing machine that helps feed thick or layered fabric through evenly. A normal machine has feed dogs that pull only the bottom layer along, which can cause the top layer to creep ahead and create puckers — a real problem when stitching the three thick layers of a quilt. The walking foot adds a second set of feed teeth on top, so the upper and lower layers move together at the same speed. This makes it the ideal foot for quilting straight lines and gentle curves and for attaching binding.

Stippling is a free-motion quilting technique used to fill an area with dense, wandering stitches. The quilter lowers the machine's feed dogs and moves the fabric freely by hand, sewing a continuous meandering line that curves and loops back on itself but never crosses over. The result is a soft, pebbly, all-over texture that flattens the background and makes other quilted motifs or appliqué shapes stand out in relief. Stippling takes practice to keep the spacing even and the lines smooth, but it is a versatile way to add rich texture to a finished quilt.

The most effective method is to learn the words while handling the materials and following a real pattern. As you cut a fat quarter, press a seam, or attach the binding, say the term aloud and notice exactly what it refers to. Reading quilting patterns and tutorials in English is especially helpful, because they use this vocabulary consistently and in context. Watching video tutorials lets you connect each word to an action you can see. Then practise the 20 terms on this page with Flash Cards on LexFizz, and test your recall with the Matching Pairs exercise.