Wednesday 13 February 2008

Easy and virtually free patchwork quilt – Part 2

Read Part 1: preparing and trimming the curtain sample fabrics.

Designing your quilt

So, by now you should have all your blocks cut to the same size, and with nice square corners. (we'll do purposely wonky pieces another time, square is much easier for now.)

Now it's time for the creative part. Lay out the blocks side by side in a combination that pleases you. In order to get a rectagular quilt you might have to ditch a few. I had 41 blocks in total, so I could have made a 5 x 8 or a 6 x 6. I plumped for a 6 x 6 as there were a couple of colours I didn't really like, so omitting 5 blocks was no hardship.

If your sample book has only a few very large fabric pieces, consider cutting them in half to give yourself more options.

Anyway, this is what I did:
First I pinned them up in the order they were fixed in the book.



Then I shuffled them about a bit:



Then I rearranged them all starting with the palest colours in the centre moving to the darkest colors at the edges. This is my favourite layout:



In my studio I have a wall covered in polystyrene so that I can pin up quilt pieces when I'm designing. Before I had this little luxury I used the floor.

Now you are ready to sew it all together. That's part 3 though, so come back soon!

2 comments:

OboeJane said...

I don't have any fabric or anything, but if I spend every evening for the next six years frowning hard and repeatedly stabbing my fingertips with pins i'll recreate that authentic quilt experience, right?

Anonymous said...

You haven't been reading part 1 have you Janie?

Frankly I don't do long-winded quilts. So far I have spent 2 and a half hours and I have completed the quilt top. That's much faster than the 6 years you are considering. Admittedly this quilt only has 36 huge pieces so it went together quickly.

You'll only get stabbed fingers if you hand quilt it. Sod that I say! I tried it once and it took about 100 hours just to do the hand quilting. It looks lovely but not that lovely.

Nope, I prefer machine quilting. No stabbed fingers and it's MUCH faster.

I know you have a sewing machine jane. You should follow my instructions and have a go at this easy quilt.

When you do, send me a picture for publication :-)