Great first quilt project

Here is the quilt I’m currently working on and will be showing you step by step how to make.  I don’t have a name for it yet, but it will be a quilt for a baby boy eventually.

A little background: several months ago before I had my youngest son, I was readying his nursery room and realized that the baby stuff could not co-exist in the same small room with the sewing stuff.  The baby stuff won out and all of my sewing stuff went into a closet at my in-laws’ house, packed away by my husband.

As I was preparing to test the sewing machine I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I realized that I didn’t have any scrap fabric with which to sew.  I made a mad dash out to my in-laws’ house to retrieve some basic sewing supplies.  I was rushing around because my infant son would need to eat soon… I was on borrowed time.  I opened the closet and saw all my sewing stuff haphazardly placed.  There were storage containers against one of the walls, but in order to reach them I would first need to move a chair, design wall, sewing machine cabinet, and tv out of the way.

I reached the bins of stored fabric and started pulling out various yardages of various fabrics here and there.  I’d forgotten what exactly I had and where it’d been placed, so I just made my way through two of the bins and gave up trying to reach the rest.

The next day I came up with a plan to make a small quilt while checking out the machine.  I wanted the quilt to be very simple to piece, but also to incorporate all the fabrics I quickly threw together.

The quilt pictured is a one-block quilt: a repeated snowball block.  It’s very easy to construct.

First, with the background fabric (light sage green floral print), cut 4 strips 9 1/2” wide.

Sub-cut each of the four 9 1/2” wide strips into four – 9 1/2” squares, yielding 16 total 9 1/2” squares.

Next, cut a total of 8 strips 3 1/2” wide from contrasting fabric yardage.  These will result in the darker colored triangles arranged to form larger diamond shapes across the quilt top.

Sub-cut each full length strip into 3 1/2” squares.  Each strip will yield eight 3 1/2” squares for a grand total of 64 – 3 1/2” squares in various fabrics.

On the back side of each 3 1/2” squares, draw a diagonal line from corner to corner, as shown here:

We’re ready to sew already!

Align a small square (right-sides of the fabrics together) to any corner of the larger 9 1/2” square, making sure outer edges are aligned and that the diagonal line is not positioned into the corner.  Look closely at the above photo to see the diagonal line mark, notice it’s direction.

Next, you will sew on the drawn line, just as shown in the photo above.  Chain piece to do the same to all 16 of the large squares.  Here’s my nice little stack:

Next step: trim the excess fabric.  I positioned my rotary ruler 1/4” from the sewn line on the side of the line closest to the outer edges.

And then cut!

Set the seam by placing the iron on top of the seam.

Open the seam and press it, like this:

Ta-da!  Now start that process over again with another fabric square in another corner.  Basically, you’ll eventually “replace” all of the corners on the large square with a contrasting fabric.

Sew along the drawn line again… then chop off the excess fabric leaving a 1/4” seam allowance.

And press open.

You’re not done, so get going with the other corners… then you can stop.

Once all of your new corners are on, you’ve got your completed snowball block.

I then arranged the 16 blocks of the floor, making sure that none of the same color of contrasting fabric triangles were directly next to each other.

And that’s it!

The blocks shown above are not sewn into a quilt top yet.  It’ll look a little better once it’s all sewn together.  It’ll look even better still when it’s quilted.

Easy enough?  Send a comment if you have a question – I’d love to help!