Planning my Next Patchwork Quilt

My goal this year is to use up all of my fabric scraps, and try not to buy any new fabric until I have depleted my already vast fabric stash. Inspired by my first ever patchwork quilt, and driven by the quilting bug, I decided to sink my teeth into an even more ambitious undertaking for my second quilt: a postage stamp style quilt using nothing but my scrap fabric.

I am new to this quilting malarkey, and self-taught to boot, so apologies if I get the terminology wrong here. Trial and error has got me here, and I am really excited about this quilt project.

The first thing I did was round-up all my fabric from their numerous hiding places all round the house, including behind the sofa (if you’re ever short of space to stash your scrap fabric, I highly recommend behind the sofa) and try to sort through it. I selected any fabric that I thought would work for the quilt I had in mind, and focussed on the smaller scrappier pieces in particular.

My quilt is going to be completely random, with no particular colour theme. I thought this would be the best way to use up my scraps and not be tempted to buy any new fabric for the project. I have no idea how the finished quilt is going to look, it might be hideous, but at least I’ll have used up some scraps 🙂

Once I had chosen all the fabric I wanted to use, I ironed each piece ready for cutting out. I already knew I wanted to make a postage stamp quilt (which I think means a quilt made from tiny little patchwork squares that resemble stamps), so after all the ironing I decided to use squared paper to actually draw out my quilt design and do some fancy maths to see what I was letting myself in for.

This quilt is going to be smaller than my last one, and made to fit a single bed, and I worked out that if I used 2″ squares of scrap fabric, arranged in 45 blocks of 36 squares, separated by strips of white fabric, I would need to cut out 1620 2″ squares of fabric. Seemed a daunting figure, but I decided if I took it slowly, with no deadline in mind, I could just work away at it and eventually get there.

In order to track my progress while making the patchwork blocks, I decided to colour each one in as I made it, which was very satisfying! In my next post I will explain the method I used to make each patchwork block of 36 squares, as it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I first thought it would be!

Once I knew I had to cut out 1620 squares, I got cutting. I used my rotary cutter and ruler to cut out long strips 2″ wide, and then piled the strips 4 or 5 high and cut the strips every 2″ to give me 2″ squares. I did this for what felt like many days, piling the little squares up in storage boxes, it was quite satisfying.

What do you think? Will it be a nice quilt? Do you like the randomness or do you think quilts look nicer if they have more order or a repeating pattern to them?

I can’t wait to just get making it!