Making a mini quilt 2: ‘Foursquare’ by Jo Morton – completing the quilting, and comparing quilting styles

I’m making the ‘Foursquare’ mini quilt from Jo Morton’s book Jo’s Little Favorites 2  (the middle one on the cover of her book).

I got a bit carried away with my quilting after my last blog post, and didn’t take pictures till the end – sorry!

I added wide dark brown fabric borders to the central panel of blocks, then removed all the papers from the little squares (I didn’t make a paper pattern for the wide borders). Then I ironed the quilt top, trimmed the edges completely square, then cut one piece of toning fabric for the back, using the top as a pattern. Using the top again as a guide, I cut a piece of thin wadding (a mini quilt only ever needs very thin wadding, or it would be out of scale). I cut it oversized at first, then trimmed it back as necessary, as wadding tends to ‘shift’ a bit as you pin it into position.

I cut two inch wide strips of the mustard colour print fabric, and made binding for the edges, which I hand stitched in place.

For this quilt, I decided to give it a go and do the actual quilting by machine, which I now think was a mistake. It has come out very neatly, but a bit TOO neatly for me! It doesn’t seem to have much character to it now.

I drew two lines in each direction with a water soluble pen on the fabric top, in each direction, to start me off, then the rest of the quilting lines I stitched by eye, once I’d got used to the amount of spacing to leave each time. I’d thought that would give it less of a ‘manufactured look’.

It’s come out nice, but a bit bland, I think! The quilting is well-defined, but too regular for me.

In comparison, here are some other mini quilts that I’ve made previously. This one was a print of quilting squares that I made into a ‘cheater quilt’, as it’s not real patchwork – it’s just printed on! But I did hand quilt it, and it’s come up nice and ‘puffy’ now that it’s been washed.

This design is called Lincoln’s Logs, and it’s the second quilt I ever made. My stitching is quite large on this one, but again it’s got a lot of character, so I like this one:

This one below is my favourite – the first one I ever made. The actual patchwork is pretty awful – you can see the tips of my triangles are cut off by the seamlines, as I stitched this one the ‘proper way’ by machine, and I kept getting my seam allowances wrong! But as far as the quilting goes, this one came out well – the stitches are small, the thread weight works, and the wadding was very thin, so it’s a flexible little quilt.

But machine quilting my mini quilts? Don’t think I’ll be trying that again.

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Making a mini quilt 1: ‘Foursquare’ by Jo Morton

Every now and then I take a break from embroidery, and doll’s houses, and make a mini quilt. They make a nice pause, in a way – quite quick to do, and portable, which I often need, as I travel quite a lot.

This quilt is one from a book that I recently bought on Amazon called  Jo’s Little Favorites 2 . Jo Morton has published several mini quilt books, and I love all of them! The quilt I’m going to make is the one in the middle on the front cover. It’s about 20 by 26 inches, when finished.

I decided to make a few changes to the design shown in the book – I’m going to make it a little bit smaller, with not as many blocks to it, and I’m going to change the colourway so that mine has more red in it, and no blue. This is my planning stage:

I don’t stitch my quilts together on a machine – I hand piece them, as I love hand sewing. So, I work out the sizes of each block from the instructions in the book, then draw a full size paper pattern (photocopying multiples, if necessary, as that’s quicker), then cut out each block pattern from medium weight paper. Then I cut the fabric pieces – usually by hand, rather than using a quilt fabric roller cutter, as these are small quilts, and it doesn’t take long to cut each piece with scissors.

I use quilting glue (like Pritt Stick, but pink – and it dries clear) rather than tacking the fabric onto each piece, as it’s really quick and precise.

This means that each block piece is accurately sized, and I can then decide how I want to piece them together.

I use these nifty little clips when I’m oversewing two pieces together, to hold the edges in place strongly while I stitch.

If you get ‘proper’ branded ones, they are really expensive, but cheap versions are available on Ebay, and to me they look the same, and are about a quarter of the cost.

When each little block is stitched together, I can then assemble them into larger blocks, making sure that the pattern works.

This is what the back looks like – you can just about see that on some of the pattern pieces I wrote ‘light’ or ‘dark print’ for example, so that I’d know how many of each type to cut from the fabrics. I leave the papers in until right at the end.

Small blocks are sewn together into strips:

…and then the strips are sewn together to make the whole central panel of the quilt.

This shows the back, at this point:

So, now I’ve just got to make the wide border, then bind it, before doing the quilting.

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