I Spy Quilts

I did the first one of these in an Evening class I went to. the idea is for all prints to be different. It involves cutting lots small pieces from lots of novelty fabrics. I wanted to use just Animals/ Insect so I built up a stash of that type of print. The Basic Block is 9" Square. You need 1x 6" sq, 1x 3" sq and 6x rectangles 2" by 3". You need 24 of these blocks. So that's 24x 6" Sqs, 24x 3" sqs, and 144x 2" by 3" rectangles. Then there is a sashing 1.5" wide, then an pieced border made up of 3" sqs and 2" x 3" rectangles - approx 60 rectangles and 24 squares. All different, all cut to show the picture off, that's potentially a lot of wastage as you cut a small piece out of the centre of a piece of fabric. The finished Quilt is 45.5" by 63.5".

I then went on to make other 1-Spy quilts using less pieces per block, and leaving off the pieced border.

A baby quilt would be 16x 9" blocks, with a 3" plain border. Finished size 42" which miraculously is the width of fabric. Make the 9" block using 1 x 6" sq and 5 x 3" sqs. A longer quilt uses 24 of these blocks.

Then when you get fed up cutting lots of 3" blocks just do a combination of 9" sqs, 6" sqs, 4.5" sqs, . and 3" sqs, because at this point you just need to use up that stash, and move on!.