Sunday 10 April 2016

Super Quick Strippy Quilt (Free Tutorial)

I bought a stash of co-ordinating fabric in a sale yesterday and challenged myself to make a quilt top out of it in what remained of the weekend!

This took a total of 7 hours.

I haven't quilted it yet (I've run out of glue spray to baste, bah), but I reckon if I had some I could have got the whole thing done in one weekend.

If you want to have a go at this super speedy quilt, here's what I did:

Materials: 9 half-metres of fabric, 3 each in 3 colourways (I had 3 different duck egg blue prints, 3 dusky purple prints, and 3 cream prints), plus 1.5m for the backing.

(This is enough to make a quilt roughly 52" by 64", and there is enough left over to do the binding and to also make a matching cushion or two from the scraps of the string pieced sheets).

1. Sort the 3 different colour sets of fabric out - two for the main strip set columns (blue and purple here) and one for the dividing colour (cream prints here).

2. Stacking the 3 coloured prints together, folding as necessary to fit on your cutting mat, cut down the grain (so the strips are 0.5 long) into 4" and 2" strips. I didn't use quite all the fabric - I had 6 of each strip (6 narrow and 6 wide of each print). Repeat for the other colourway.

3. From the cream prints, cut only 4" strips. You'll need 256" in total for a 64" long quilt (4x64) but I'd do a bit extra - maybe 270". Subcut these - I cut random lengths in the 6-12" range.

4. For each of the blue and purple strip sets, sew them together along their long (0.5m) edges to make a string sheet. I did this in a simple repeating pattern:

      Narrow strip of Print A
      Wide strip of Print B
      Narrow strip of Print C
      Wide strip of Print A
      Narrow strip of Print B
      Wide strip of Print C

5. Sew the cream strips together end to end to make 4 long strips each at least 64" long.

6. Press all seams (it helps the sewing together to press all the seams in the same direction on each string sheet).

7. Fold up the blue and purple string sheets lengthwise (so the folded pile is 0.5m wide and narrow enough to fit on your cutting board). Trim the ragged edges straight, and subcut into columns: I cut  the the blue string sheet into half (two columns of about 10" wide each), and the purple string sheet into two 4" columns and one wider 13" column.


8. Now simply arrange the columns and sew the long edges together.







9. A beautiful quilt top in about 7 hours - to be honest it might have been less, I kept having to get up and cook meals/deal with squealing children, so my counting wasn't that accurate!

10. Baste and quilt as desired. This is mainly fabric from a Lewis and Irene collection with bees in a meadow, so I plan to echo the subtle bee theme with a simple wandering clover free motion design - which also has the advantage of being very quick!