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SIGNATURE QUILT

This week I have been concentrating on Janet’s signature quilt. This is a very personal gift from me to her, to record her 60^th birthday. I prepared patches in advance and mingled amongst the guests at her party, explaining why I wanted them to sign a bit of fabric (come on, humour me!). I took coloured pens, fine ones especially for writing on fabric, and I gave each guest a chance to practice first on piece of scrap fabric to get used to writing on fabric.

METHOD

To start you need fabric. I haven’t a clue how much I will need as I don’t know how many signatures I will be collecting. But I have 3 metres of a colourful batik and plenty of good quality cream calico. The large squares of cream and colour are cut at 3 ½” and the small squares of colour are 2”.

01 Fabric

The block is a 9-patch, consisting of 4 repeated corner squares (for the signatures) and 4 repeated star-point squares and a coloured centre square.

02 The block

03 The 9-patches

For each block, you will need to prepare 4 corner squares like this.

04 Signed corner square

To make the signed corner squares: place a 2” coloured square onto the corner of a cream square. Sew across the diagonal of the coloured square.

TIP: This is the best tip ever for accurate sewing without marking the fabric first! You will see a marked black line on my machine which is in line with my needle. I place the lower corner of the coloured square on this line and watch it move along that line towards the needle as I sew. I gives a perfect diagonal and you can’t go wrong!

05 Sew across the diagonal

06 Add a second square on the opposite corner

07 Before trimming

08 After trimming and pressing

For each block you will need 4 star-point squares like this.

09 The star-point square

To make the star-point squares: place a 2” coloured square onto the corner of a cream square. Sew across the diagonal of the coloured square as above. Trim away the corner and press the triangle over.

10 Corner triangle, trimmed

11 Corner triangle, pressed

Add a second square on the adjacent corner and sew it across the diagonal in the same way.

12 Adjacent triangle

TIP: If you can’t bear to throw these triangles away, they can be sewn together with a ¼” seam and used for the border.

More next week!