Sunday, May 19, 2013

A baby hounds-tooth quilt


Lately it seems everyone is having a baby. I usually try to have some small quilts on hand, at least one girly and one neutral or boy made from my scraps. This time however with several girls in the works I needed to make some quilts fast. I did a quick sketch and pulled some fat quarter bundles from my stash that were reserved for just this occasion.
To make the hounds-tooth pattern you need 2 or 4 fabrics, this is for my easy version I have seen quilts with more but it would take some care and planning.
Next you'll cut 2¾" strips I used one fat quarter of each fabric (make sure you have enough to cut out matching 6½" squares).
 Next sew pairs of strips together...
 Iron them open...
 Now sew these two strip sets together. Sew on both sides to create a fabric tube.
Next we cut our 6½" squares. One way to do this is with your regular square ruler. using the diagonal line down the middle you can place that on your stitch line and cut.
 Or if you have the quilt in a day 6½" triangle square up ruler it works perfectly.
From the fat quarters I got 3 blocks from every "4 strip set" giving me a total of 18 blocks from my 4 fat quarters. As you can see below from that strip set two of my blocks are identical and one is different you'll need equal amounts of each block type to complete the quilt.
To get equal amounts you simply need to flip your strip set over so for example fabrics A and B are on the top for half of the triangles you cut and fabrics C and D are on the top for the other half. We have to do this because the fat quarters only give us 3 blocks per set since it's an odd number  we have to flip the set to make it even. If you are working with yards of fabric you might get 4-6 blocks out of your set and need not worry. I would open up your blocks and make stacks to ensure you have a even amount.
 Next I cut 6½" squares out of my four fabrics with the other fat quarter bundle. You can get 6 squares from each fat quarter.
I used only 4 squares from two of the fabrics and 5 squares from the other two fabrics below is what I had left.
Here's my layout. As you turn your stripey squares and match up your fabrics the design easily begins to fall into place.

And here's the finished quilt! This ended up being 34"square.



 Here's how the back turned out. I ended up using those leftover squares plus some other additional fabrics to create this pieced back.

Thanks for reading♥ Olivia

No comments: