About Julia
Julia loves making miniature quilts on a variety of themes – – especially small, pictorial quilts with little villages and sea sides. Her quilts have been inspired by travel in the UK & the Mediterranean.
She also loves Christmas themed patchwork & quilting. This is reflected in many of her designs for wall hangings, mini quilts, garlands, tree decorations and wreaths.
Julia tends to use a very quick and easy techniques that anyone can apply successfully. No expertise is required. You just need to like making little quilts.
Currently, Julia is beginning to work on larger quilts made with recycled vintage linens, especially those with embroidery. She enjoys recycling beautiful pieces of vintage work into new projects.
She has taught for many years and has experience of teaching the City & Guilds course. She also runs workshops including a weekend retreat with justhands-on.tv!
Julia lives in Surrey and travels all over the country to deliver talks and workshops. And, you will often see Julia at major quilt shows including Sandown and the Festival of Quilts.
Click here to see Valerie catch up with Julia about her miniature quilts.
Signature Technique
Miniature Quilts
Top Tips
- Miniature quilts are a great, quick way to use up your scrap fabrics and have fun playing with simple shapes (e.g. beach huts and houses) and different colour ways.
- For small shadow applique, use a fabric glue pen on the fabric shapes rather than fusible web.
- To secure fabric pieces, cover with shadow fabric (fine polyester tulle or wedding net), lay on top of thin wadding and backing fabric, secure with small pins and then secure shapes with machine quilting.
- You don’t have to use a walking foot when quilting a miniature quilt. Use an open toe applique foot. It’ll help you see the direction to stitch in.
Videos
Patterns
Posts
Filming with Paula Doyle and Julia Gahagan
Despite having put in 4 long days at the Festival of Quilts providing workshops and demonstrations these two ladies joined Dave, Matt and Val for a day's filming . Paula Doyle generously allowed us to use her lovely workshop and you can see us getting ready (!) - Look out for workshops with Paula on making her Tulip Tree Bag and on hand quilting but you can enjoy her mini-mosaics workshop now by clicking here: Julia Gahagan is passionate about miniature quilts and showed us how easy it is to create a small shadow applique project.