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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Janet Granger's Blog 
I find your process quite interesting, and makes it seem like something I could tackle. If you don’t mind me asking, do you take the paper pieces out before completing the quilt?
I take the papers out after I’ve added the wide borders – it helps to keep the whole piece stiffer and easier to handle if I do that. I take them all out in one go, and the quilt top suddenly becomes ‘one piece’ that is all floppy! It totally changes how it feels. Then I continue layering the top, wadding and backing, and then quilt it.