If you’ve seen a zig-zag quilt, you’ll immediately see the fascination. It looks like giant bands of rick-rack trim sewn into a quilt — but really, the zig-zag effect is achieved with a series of triangles and a trick of the eye.

Now, you might look at a zig-zag quilt and figure it’s pretty straightforward to make — but it turns out there are a couple of different ways to cut your triangle pieces and a couple of different ways to assemble them, too.

Check out these quilt tutorials for great instructions and, better yet, for the photographs and illustrations that are soooo essential to make sense of each quilter’s cutting and piecing methods –

I love the way this shows how the quilting community tends to share ideas and build on each others’ creativity, too:

Taylor Groneck has a quick tutorial for a zig-zag quilt based on a pattern in Denyse Schmidt Quilts, and with the advice of…

Nettie Pete (of Etsy and A Quilt Is Nice fame) who shares her Zig-Zag Quilt Tutorial for the quilt inspired by…

The Purl Bee’s Zig Zag Quilt. The Purl Bee is the blog of Joelle & Jennifer Hoverson’s awesome and inventive crafty-sewing shop, Purl, by the way — and if you visit The Purl Bee, better plan to set aside a couple hours to explore… and you’ll want to check out their Triangle Tutorial, too, if you’ve ever had trouble making nice trim corners.

In fact, most quilters (except maybe the real quilting divas among us) agree that the main challenge of a zig-zag quilt — once you’ve picked the fabrics and planned the colours layout — is to take care to get the points of the triangles lined up right when you’re sewing them together.

Another help for this might be the triangle templates and clear how-to illustrations in a new free zig-zag quilt pattern that Anna Maria Horner, author of Seams to Me: 24 New Reasons to Love Sewing, offers as a free PDF download on her blog. “The Folk Dance” is what Horner calls her version of the vintage zig-zag quilt pattern.

Jude Hill is the guiding hand behind the What If… Quilting Collaborative, an online group of about 40 keen quilters (and counting!) that has just one mission:

… to revisit the Crazy Quilting style and share our results. We are asking questions about technique and rules and style using the traditional Crazy Quilt framework as a jumping off point.

There’s a pledge to keep an open mind and to challenge each other to new heights of creativity, and a Flickr group to share the results of “what-if” in every colour of the rainbow and every technique you might imagine. It’s textile art, and cooperative creativity that goes to the heart of the quilting tradition — in a very nontraditional way!

I’m not a quilter, myself, but I did enjoy some time this week surfing quilting sites, in search of yardage information I needed to buy backing fabric for an inherited quilt top.

It was pieced by my late mother-in-law, shortly before her descent into Alzheimer’s disease stole her ability to work at the crafts that gave her such joy for many years.

Finally the time has come for this quilt to be finished — the local church ladies have a quilting circle, and I’ve been on their waiting list for some time now.

I love the idea that the church ladies will be doing the actual quilting and finishing on this quilt: it will give the piece even more meaning as a memory piece, as these ladies were my mother-in-law’s dear friends.

But how much fabric should I buy for the backing?

That was the question — I’m not a quilter, as I say — and I was happy to find the answer quickly in a quilt backing fabric requirements chart online.

While looking for that, however, I also stumbled across a handy quilt fabric calculator, which helps you to figure out the amount of material needed to make a pieced quilt top. You put in the size of the blocks, the number of blocks across and down the quilt, and the width of the fabric. Hit the “calculate” button and it tells you the yardage of fabric required!

I also found a wonderfully inspiring article called You Too Can Make a Quilt!. Something tells me, it won’t be too long before I can’t resist starting a quilt of my very own.

And I understand that there’s something called “lap quilting” that lets you build a quilt one block at a time. That sounds like just the thing for a beginner like me. If I get overwhelmed, my “quilt” can always turn into a cushion cover!