Skip to main content

Four Patch Charm Quilt

You know how your looking around on the internet and you might be on Pinterest, a magazine website or a blog post and you see a particular quilt pattern that you really love and you bookmark that webpage and tell yourself, "one day I will do that quilt, it's awesome!" and within a week or so you forget all about it?

Yeah, we've all done it, don't lie. Anyway, I was going back through my bookmarked webpages basically cleaning out what I don't want anymore and I found this Four Patch Charm Quilt from Tamarack Shack. I bookmarked this quilt years ago and I since I re-discovered it, I decided to get my backside in gear and get it done. It's a simple quilt yet very interesting, which I think is it's appeal. Tamarack Shack was also kind enough to put up a PDF file with instructions on how to make the quilt.

This quilt uses 96, 5" squares. So look for some charm packs or get your scrap fabric out and get sewing! I couldn't find any charm packs that I liked so I bought some fat quarters to cut up. Yes, this will make more cutting for me but cutting 96 squares isn't that bad. I decided to go with Gemstone Stonehenge gradation fabrics because of their rich color. I also bought 7.5 yards of bali batiks handpaints sunflower oyster fabric for the top, binding and backing from Fabric.com. If you've never shopped on Fabric.com, I urge you to check it out. I love saving the fabrics to the design wall and when I have enough for whatever project I'm making, they're all saved in one place. I just hope they're all still available when I do want to buy them.



This quilt is a bunch of half square triangles which I didn't realize just looking at the photo of the quilt but the instructions on the PDF are very clear on how to go about making this quilt so I won't reiterate what's on the PDF.

I washed all the fabric, iron everything and got cutting my fat quarters into 5" squares. Next, I cut up my background fabric according to the instructions and once I had all my pieces together I started sewing.

I didn't have any trouble sewing the blocks together or cutting them on the diagonal but I did find I had a lot more trouble with the squares being stretchy after cutting everything on the bias. I had more trouble than what I'd of liked to have had anyway so if your a beginner sewer try to have a more experienced sewer around to help out. Another area I had some issues with was the bulk at some meeting points. Some were super thick to try to sew through so I trimmed out the bulk a few times but some were still really thick to have to deal with.



I laid out my squares according to the diagram and got sewing. I was very pleased with how everything was coming together but I will say making sure your seams lined up correctly was a bit difficult. I consider my sewing skills to be intermediate and I had some trouble and some of them look pretty "off" in some places but I can't help it. I'll rack that up to learning experience and I'm sure I'll do better the second time around. I also noticed after I got borders sewn on that I have 2 blocks out of position. Needless to say it's a glaring mistake in the quilt top and I'm going to have to fix it. It's really frustrating because I checked each row after sewing them together if everything looked okay but even checking it, I still messed up.

Anyway, I completed this quilt top working on it for a few hours each day and got it done in about 6 days. I'm sure if you really wanted to get it done quickly you can do it in a long weekend. I'm hoping to get it quilted soon and I'll post a photo of the quilt completely done in the coming months. My quilt top measured 63x69" when finished to give you an idea of size.

All an all a really nice quilt and the instructions were clear.














Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Jacobean Journey Quilt - Trunk Show

On Saturday, January 17, I went to my local quilt shop, Quilt Beginnings, and everyone who made either a Jacobean Journey or Feathered Star quilt last year brought in their projects. Some were finished, close to being finished or still in pieces.  Below is my quilt.  Its brown, cream, peach and a melon like color.  The blocks have been really fun to do and putting all the blocks together have definitely challenged me and some of the other ladies I spoke with. The next two pictures, are of a mother and daughter and their quilts.  They have a similar theme with black, gray, red, white and dark gold color. When asked if they were going to attempt to do the next Hoopsister's embroidery quilt "Sewn Seeds," which there's a sneak peak of at the end, they both said, "Nooooooooooo." Also, these guys say they're novice sewers but I think they've graduated! This lovely lady, did her Jacobean Journey quilt in red, pink, white and a very light blue

Jacobean Journey Quilt - Block A3H8

We finally started the applique border blocks of the Jacobean Journey quilt this month and the instructions that I was given was a little... well, confusing.  According, to Hoopsisters the instructions for several blocks are the same so they don't want to print different blocks with the same type of instructions.  So their solution was to draft the instructions using a sample of the blocks with pictures for that one block. However, additional blocks do not get their own set of pictures but share the same instructions.  For example, if a block has only 2 fabrics (say 1 and 4) you follow instructions A, which will have pictorial examples of only 1 type of block, which may or may not match the block you are currently stitching out.  So this was fairly confusing for me since my Babylock doesn't show file names just pictures and my pictures didn't match the set of instructions (or so I thought) I received since the pictures didn't match at all. So my suggestion would be

Jacobean Journey Quilt - Block C4

We're finally seeing hints of spring with temps in the 60's and 70's.  Trust me we're really happy considering how cold and long this past winter has been.  Seriously makes me think of moving to California but everywhere has its own problems so I'll stick with the ones I know. This is the second month of Jacobean Journey Quilt and this month we were assigned to do two blocks - C4 and D5.  I'll discuss block D5 in another posting just to space things out a bit. I have to admit I'm glad we didn't start out with these two blocks first, although that's what Hoopsisters starts you out with. At our last class, there were approximately 20-30 women there who were doing one of two Hoopsisters patterns, either Jacobean Journey or Feathered Star.  Those who brought their blocks in did a little show-n-tell and all of them looked really good and everyone seemed really pleased with everyone else's. TIP: Prepare all your fabric first!  Cut the appropriat