happy christmas from mrs molebags

how to cheat at patchwork

I have been thinking about making a quilt from Mr P's old shirts, and other bits of blue from my pile of charity shop finds, but it needed a few bright bits to make it sing.

Then a kind friend visited the National Quilt Museum in America and brought me back these lovely zingy batiks.

Somewhere on the marvellous internet I've seen this method of quickly making a quilt with small squares, so I thought I'd try it.

I cut my squares to 2.5 inches, as the batiks were 5 inch squares (although if you were more nimble fingered than me you could make them smaller), and then carefully ironed them side by side on to a piece of very lightweight interfacing.

So now the little dears can't move about!

Then I folded along the joins, and sewed along them using my trusty quarter-inch foot...

Here's how the back looks when its all sewn together...

A quick press, and then I sewed it all together the other way...

Et voila! Very fast, and all lined up, which might be a first for me! This is a 12 inch square, so I need to make a few more to have a respectable sized quilt. I don't think the interfacing will make a difference to the feel of the quilt once its all sandwiched and quilted, as its the lightest-weight one I could get. I'm aiming for a lap-quilt kind of size, and then I'll wash it to see how it feels after that.

Or I could just leave it hanging in the window to make the grey weather seem more bearable...