How Much Thread Do I Need for My Quilt?
Ashley HoughWhether you are ordering online or simply buying all of your quilting supplies ahead of time at the store, knowing how many yards of thread will be needed for your quilting project is important. Ashley Hough shares some general guidelines for determining how much thread will be needed to complete your next project.
Quilt Size and Thread Yardage
Before determining how much thread will be needed, you must first decide how large your quilt is going to be. If you are following a pattern, it will tell you from the beginning whether you are making a twin, queen, or king size quilt. If you are making up your own design, determine what the finished length and width of the quilt is going to be.
Once you have your dimensions, find where your quilt fits in terms of standard quilt sizes. While there are common quilt sizes that fit standard mattress sizes, there can still be slight variations in finished quilt sizes anywhere from three to eight inches. After classifying your quilt into one of the standard quilt sizes, determine how much quilting you plan to do. This can be anything from light to medium to heavy quilting and is in terms of how close together you plan to quilt.
From there, take your quilt size with the desired quilting amount and use the chart to see how much thread, in yards, will be needed. Note that this is an approximation and you may need slightly more or less thread if your quilting does not quite fall within one of the light, medium, or heavy quilting parameters.
Once you know the yardage that is needed, it’s time to shop for thread. Choosing the right quilting thread is as important as choosing the right fabric, as it is what holds the layers together. A quilting thread overview will give you more information on the types of quilting threads available and what you should choose.
Knowing how much fabric you need to make a quilt or knowing how much fabric you need for the backing of a quilt are important things to know and very common questions that people ask quilters but also knowing how much thread you need to have to quilt a quilt is also important. This could be whether you're going to send it to someone else to have the quilting done and you wanna provide the thread, maybe because you wanna cut down on cost or you wanna use a specific type of thread or maybe you live fairly far away from your fabric store and you wanna buy everything you absolutely need to make this quilt piecing, fabric and quilting the quilts all in one stop shop. So knowing how much thread you need to quilt your quilt depends on the size of quilts you're making. These are some of the standard quilt sizes, everything from a crib quilt, all the way up to a king quilt. Now, if you just search for common sizes of quilts you're gonna get some variation in the sizes anywhere from five to eight inches, difference on length and width and it can still be considered a crib versus a lap, throw or even a twin.
So these are some of these standard quilt sizes including the variations in sizes. So for example, a twin quilt can be anywhere from 70 to 72 by 90 to 95. Going all the way up to a king, it can be anywhere from 110 to 120 and generally that's a large square. So these are the standard quilt sizes. So once you know what size of quilt your quilt falls into, you can then determine how much thread you need to quilt your quilt.
So on this page here, I have some general thread requirements in yards because that is the standard way that a lot of thread is labeled in yards. If you usually work in meters or the thread you have is in meters you're gonna have to convert these numbers. But so these are the amount of yards of thread you need to quilt a quilt. And again, these are these standard sizes of quilts anywhere from crib all the way up to king. And this here is the amount of quilting you're going to do.
Light quilting, quilting only every three to four inches. Medium quilting, every two to three inches, maybe even down to one and a half inches. Heavy quilting is going to be within an inch or less, or even into some stipple quilting. So some very, very heavy quilting. So you'll just use this handy guide and if you are going to make a full quilt and you know you're gonna do somewhere between medium to light quilting on that quilt, you're gonna come down here to full-size quilts, light to medium, you know you're gonna need anywhere between five to 900 yards of thread.
Now, that may sound like a lot of thread. You may be thinking, I'm gonna need to buy so many spools of thread, but that's going to depend on the size of spool that you buy. So, push this off to the side here. These are some of the standard sizes of quilt threads that you can find. I have them from very small, all the way up to very large.
And obviously the amount of thread differs on each one of these spools. So if you're going to do light quilting on a crib quilt you would need 200 yards of thread so you could get away with a spool of thread like this. This one happens to have 220 yards of thread on this spool. So that would even give you a little bit of extra in case you do just slightly over like quilting. If you are gonna come down here and do a queen-size quilts and you wanna do heavy quilting, you're going to need 1600 yards of threads to do your quilting, so you're going to need to pick a larger spool of thread.
So, anywhere on the spool of thread will always be a label that tells you how much thread is on that thread spool. So again, this one was down here, actually printed on the plastic thread spool itself, while on others, it's gonna located somewhere on the label that is on your thread. So on this one, it has 1200 yards of thread. So you would need more than one of these if you're going to do heavy quilting on your queen size quilts. So you may want to just jump up to an even larger thread spool like this one that has 3000 yards of quilting.
So now if you look back at your thread requirements and you decide you're going to do maybe heavy quilting on a king-sized quilt, you could almost do or you could do all of that quilting with this one spool of thread because it has 3000 yards. So just because you see the number and you think that is so much thread I'm gonna need so many threads spools you definitely wanna take a look at how much thread is on each spool of thread and you wanna buy accordingly. So if you're going to do a lot of quilting definitely buy a larger thread spool rather than having to buy five or even 10 of these smaller spools of thread to complete your quilting. So again, to know how much thread you need to quilt your quilt first, decide what size of quilt your quilt is. Again, these are standard quilt sizes including some variation for each of them, determine how much quilting you wanna do, light medium or heavy and then use this chart to determine how much thread in yards you're going to need to either quilt your quilt or you're going to need to provide to someone else to quilt your quilt.
I’m disappointed that I had to read in the comments that the quantity of thread given in the chart is only for the top of the quilt! Obviously, this should have been mentioned in the video—or at the VERY least in the discussion. Links to charts were also promised to be added to the description, but have not been done so after 3 years. So disappointing! I’m beginning to question why I paid for a premium membership.
can you send me a copy of these charts to keep as a reference in the future? Thanks. Donna Rouse
<strong> Does this include the bobbin thread too.
Under discussion it says that there are 6 responses to "How much thread to quilt a quilt?" but I can't see any of the other comments. Why? That information is often really helpful. When did you start hiding comments?
I couldn’t find the chart that was referred to.
Good information! I really had no idea how much thread to buy when I was at the store today. I was buying for the quilt I'm working on right now, now I know that I have plenty of thread! Thanks, Ashley.
Isn't there a printable valuable of the chart you show on the video?
Would the amount of thread needed for the bobbins be approximately the same amount?
Based on estimates I've seen elsewhere the amounts shown do not include the amount of thread you would need for the bobbin, is that right?