Easy Beginner Quilt Top Tutorial—Mostly

I love quilts that are simple to make but still look great.  And this is one of those quilts.  If you are a novice quilt top maker or have been wanting to try your hand at a quilt top this may be a great way to ease into quilting.

This entire quilt is comprised of 5 and one half inch blocks.

Some blocks are solid pieces of fabrics while other blocks are simple 4 Patches.  (A 4 Patch is a block made up of 4 smaller blocks.)  And all of the blocks have been randomly dispersed throughout the quilt.

If you would like to make one you would need 1/4 yard of 7 different fabrics and 1 half yard of white fabric.

Once you have chosen your fabric you will cut out your large solid squares:

Cut each square to be 5.5 inches.

How many of each print should you cut?  Well…that is up to you.  For me I cut the most white squares (I used 24 of them) and the least of the polka dot squares (I only used 6 of them)

Altogether you will need 72 to squares to make this small decorative throw…in mine 64 of them were these solid 5.5 inch squares while the other 8 were 4 patch squares.

4 Patch Squares are easy to make but if this is one of your first quilts only making a handful of them will let you get in some good practice without feeling overwhelming.

To make a 4 Patch choose 4 fabrics.  (I chose 2 prints and then a white to use for my last 2 choices.)

Cut these fabrics into 3 inch squares.  Because I was only doing 8 of these squares I only needed to cut 8 of the red squares, 8 of the blue squares, and 16 of the white squares.

After your squares are cut it’s time to get sewing!

Choose the two fabrics that you would like to have in the top two positions of your four patch.  Lay them wrong sides together and sew them together with a 1/4 inch seam allowance.  Then repeat that same process for the bottom two squares in your 4 patch.

Press your seams.

(For this project I pressed my seams toward the dark fabric and away from the white fabric.)

Then lay your top two squares on top of your bottom two squares with the right sides together and sew them together still using that 1/4 inch seam allowance.

Open it up and press.

All you have left to do to these blocks is to “square them up”.

This is an important step when making quilt and we will be dedicating an entire post to squaring up blocks in the very near future.  When that happens we will link to it right here.

After you have your 4 Patches all squared up and your other blocks cut it is time to lay out your quilt.

I usually lay my quilts out right in the middle of the family room floor where I have room to spread out.

Now this is a small quilt, really it’s just a decorative throw and so it is only 8 blocks wide and 9 blocks down.

And I played around with the block placement for a while before getting the random pattern that I ended up with.

After you have your layout exactly as you would like you sew each row of blocks together and each row to each other with right sides together and a 1/4 inch seam allowance.

Again I haven’t written out a step by step for this.  This block by block row by row process is something that you are going to do over and over again when making quilts and there are a few tips and tricks that come in handy when doing this….which is why we will be having another entire day dedicated to sewing quilt rows.  (When this post goes live we will link to it right here as well.)

Once your top is finished choose your backing:

And how you plan to finish off your quilt.

Quilts need to have someway for the top fabric and the bottom fabric to be held together in place.  The most popular choices for this is to take them to a service that machine quilts them or to tie your quilt.

I chose to tie this quilt.  (I have a real thing for tied quilts)

Then you add your binding.  (Another tutorial that is coming soon.)

And you are finished.

Believe it or not but once you start quilting you will be able to go through this entire process in a weekend.  (And love every minute of it.)

In fact, today as you are reading this my sister will be at my house and we plan to make a larger quilt like this from start to finish all in one afternoon.  It will be a fun day!  Wish us luck!

-liZ

PS:  The fabric for this quilt came from Micheal Miller.  It is a combination of fabrics from two different lines…but I loved them both so much I couldn’t help myself.  When doing a quilt as simple as the one I just shared fabric choice is key and bold, delightful prints like these are really perfect choices.