Full Blown Quilt Lust

Yesterday, I thought I was in love with this little quilt.  Now that I've got it quilted, it's a case of full blown quilt lust.

In case you didn't read the last post, this is a scaled down version of Marilyn with the color placement in the nine-patch blocks reversed. The blocks are 1 1/2" and the quilt itself finishes at about 7" square. I could have, by the absolute skin of my teeth, used the same fat quarter for the top and back and binding, but I decided to use a piece from a coordinating pink fat quarter. The more different pinks in my stash the better, right?

I did the teeniest stippling I could manage. The thing can stand up by itself at this point, but since it’s probably going to do time as a mug rug before it makes it up to the sewing room wall, I don’t see that as a problem.

Want to make your own?  Start with a fat quarter in a tiny, tone-on-tone print. You’re going to be cutting it into little pieces and don’t want color changes in the print to distract from the piecing.

Cutting from the 18” side of the fat quarter, cut six 1" strips and one 3" strip.  You’ll be using four of those to strip piece the nine-patch blocks and cutting two into thirty-six 1" squares for the snowball blocks.  From white background fabric, cut five 1” x 18” strips and nine 2” squares .  From the 3” strip, cut three 3” squares for side setting triangles and two 2” squares for corner setting triangles. Cut the 3” squares into four smaller triangles as shown and the 2” squares once on the diagonal.

Sew the 1” strips together lengthwise. Make two sets with white strips on the outside and one set with pink strips on the outside.  Cut into 1” sections and assemble sixteen nine patch blocks.

Place a 1” pink square in each corner of the 2” white squares and stich and flip to make the snowball blocks. It’s going to look really wrong, and the nine-patch blocks will look odd too,  but when you sew the blocks together into the top they’ll look they should. 

Lay out the blocks as shown (including the corner triangles, which didn't make it into this picture. If you need more details on the assembly of the blocks and top, you can find it in the Marilyn tutorial. I found it easiest to lay out the nine patch blocks in three rows of three and then fill in the rest of the blocks from there.

See! Once you get the rows sewn together, things start to look like they should --

I cut 2" strips for the binding. If you want to use the same fat quarter for backing, I'd suggest cutting the backing square first and then making your binding from what's left. There should be just barely enough. 

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