I have been holding onto this post for a very long time. Quarantine has limited my ability to connect with two of my close friends who got married earlier this year, and instead of posting a picture of this quilt I made and spoiling the surprise… I had to wait until I could have a socially distance exchange and give them the present. Now that they have the quilt, you can have your tutorial!
When I started this quote, I knew that I wanted to make a blue background out of flannel to help keep this quilt cozy (you’re actually looking at the back of the quilt, the front has a modified jelly roll race on the front, but instead of using precut jelly rolls, I decided to buy fabric by the yard and cut it out by hand to have thicker bricks that are shorter than jelly roll races… maybe that is a post for another day!)
In addition to the blue background, I wanted to personalize the quilts to commemorate their marriage, and I couldn’t think of a better way than giving it a monogram.
I toyed with the idea of creating actual strips for the back to so between the sections of the letter, but settled on creating a free form letter that I would then carefully so on top of the flat, unbroken backing (I splurged on 104 inch flannel so that I would have an unbroken back for this quilt, and I definitely think that it was 100% worth it. I’ve done quilts with split backs before, and the biggest thing that I try not to do is have a sew them directly in the middle of the quilts, but rather perhaps putting two colors, or adding a border or piece of trim between the two pieces to help make it look purposeful. Having a seam in the middle of the quilt is not the end of the world though, I just find it a particularly fun challenge to overcome on quotes that are wider than the typical 42-44 inch width.)
Once I decided on creating this freeform monogram (it’s the S, I really hope you could tell that from the photo!), I needed to do math to figure out exactly how much of each color I needed to create the striped letter, without warping, and to take into account seam allowance.
Here’s a rough sketch of the general idea. Since I didn’t use background color in the empty spaces of the letter, I need a distill account for this in my math. I figured out the general S shape, and gave myself a quarter inch seam allowance on each horizontal line wear one color met itself, as well as on every vertical line where one color met a different color… also, and probably most important, I did not forget to allow for the seam allowance on the borders where the color met my black area. This allowed for me to topstitch over all edges on the quilts to allow for all of the edges to be hemmed.
I wanted the width of the S to be a foot wide. With six different colored stripes, this meant that each color of the stripe would be 2 inches after all seem allowance was taken into consideration. This meant that I was using 2 1/2 inch strips to make my segments.
There are really two ways that I figured out how do my math to make this S.
The first being cutting 2 1/2 x 2 1/2“ squares and sewing them together in this pattern to allow for the appropriate quarter of an inch seam allowance either with the color to its own color block, the color to the adjacent color, or the color to the black square where I would be hemming the edge.
The second being allowing for full length strips of color to be unbroken, which involves slightly more math. This would mean for my red sections, I had to remove a half an inch for the middle of the color segment where the top red square made the bottom red square. This meant that my total strip length was 2 1/2 inches in width, bye 4 1/2 inches in height for both of the red sections. I did my math by allowing each square of color to be 2 inches and adding a quarter of an inch for my seam on every side where it touches either in a posing color, or a black square. Wear one color black met another color block of the same color, I did not allow for the seam allowance. This means that I am allowed to keep a solid strip of that color, rather than piecing individual squares as in the first example.
^^ don’t forget to click to pin to save for yourself, or share with a friend!
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