The Lazy Quilters Quilt - No Measuring Required! - Tidbits

It is much like a scrap quilt, where the individual fabric pieces are not uniform in size or shape and there is no real pattern at all.

This quilt came together so fast, I hardly had a chance to get bored.

The birthday boy really loves it as well.

After having 3 girls before him, I thoroughly enjoyed picking out boy prints for his quilt.

I went with sort of a vintage/neutral vibe when picking out my fabrics.

With a touch of patriotism thrown in there, for good measure.

It all began when I saw the vintage airplane fabric, and about died at its cuteness.

Everything I picked from there was to coordinate with that design.

Here are some of the fabric resources, if you too, are dying over the cuteness.

Fabrics from Jo-Ann’s was found simply by searching the store, as were the Wal-Mart selections.

Click on the titles to see the links for the fabrics I found on Fabric.com (no affiliation, just found exactly what I wanted).

(Plaid Backing was also found at Jo-Ann’s Fabric Store)

The style of the blanket goes great with his itty bitty room (which I hope to show you shortly).

And I’ve learned how fun it is to sew for boys, and I think I’m hooked.

In fact, sewing this quilt was so enjoyable, I can’t wait for the next birthday to come!

Now let me explain how easy it was to sew this very random pieced quilt, where I didn’t measure a thing! I made a crib size, but you could really adapt this style with any size at all, as long as you know how wide and long the backing needs to be.

Materials:

Backing fabric – For a crib size quilt, I read online that most people buy 1 1/2 yards. So that is what I did.

Batting – I simply headed to the batting section of the fabric store and bought some thin batting that was packaged as a “crib size”.

Front – If you can plan out what you need, great. But I was being lazy and just collected adorable boy fabrics as I saw them. I do have oodles of fabric left over, but I’m sure I’ll find a good purpose for them. I grabbed any fat quarters I loved for smaller pieces, or just had them cut 1/4 yard of any fabric I found on the bolt. The down side to buying online, is that on Fabric.com, it only came in 1/2 yard or 1 yard increments. I have the most left over fabric from the selection I bought there. Which is why I recommend searching your fabric stores first to see if you can collect enough variety of the designs you like.

Binding – I used leftover to make bias slices for the binding (more on that below).

Once I felt like I had all the fabrics I wanted/needed, I washed and dried all the fabrics to reduce any wonky shrinkage after it was sewed together. This step is SOOO important! I also pressed the fabrics flat and trimmed any mess of threads after that was done.

Then, I laid out the backing fabric onto the floor. This was so I knew how many pieces I would need to cut to fill up the backing.

I just started cutting fabrics to very random sizes and laying them out on top of the backing in any random fashion. I was sure to space the same fabrics away from each other. I learned it was okay to overlap fabrics at this step, as I was just trying to fill the whole section. I didn’t worry about measuring a thing.

Once the whole backing was covered in fabric squares, rectangles, or strips – I began stitching from the bottom up.

I would first look at the pieces and determine the easiest route to begin. Sometimes that meant stitching small similar sizes together, and then attaching them to larger pieces. Sometimes it worked to go from left to right. Other times, part of one side and then the other. My main goal was to form them into smaller strips and then sew the strips together to complete the top. Below, you can see one strip completed.

What you will run into, by laying fabrics stacked and disordered like this, is corners – like seen below.

It’s possible to join that corner – but a huge pain for being a lazy persons quilt job.

So rather then dealing with the corners, I would slice the fabric stitched together and even up the edge where I wanted to attach the next fabric piece. This did waste some, but not much. And I would have to sometimes add a strip to fill in a whole created by the slice, but this was easy to do as I just cut another random piece, stitched it on and sliced any extra I didn’t need.

I found this method much better than worrying about if my seams matched up perfectly and if I had the correct colors where they needed to be.

I could even watch a movie while doing it, as it took little brain power.

I will also note, I ended up having to add another row of fabrics pieced together at the top to compensate for what I lost in seam allowances and by chopping off uneven edges. So be sure to plan ahead for that.

Once the top was completed and matched the size of the backing, I made my quilt sandwich. If you are unfamiliar with that, you lay the backing right side down on the floor or table. Place the batting on top, and the front of the quilt wrong side down on top of the batting.

I safety pinned the thunder out of the 3 layers to make sure it was ready for quilting, and trimmed the batting and edges so it all lined up nicely.

Here is where I tell you I am no expert quilter – if you haven’t figured that out yet. But I found some wonderful resources to guide me through, which hopefully will be of help to you also.

I did a stipple stitch at

this point, to quilt it together. This was my first attempt at this quilting pattern, and I practiced for hours before I tackled the quilt. I found the following websites very helpful in learning how to do this.

My stippling looks more like abstract trees, but I was pretty dang proud of myself for the accomplishment. I almost paid to get the quilting done, but I am so glad I didn’t!

After it was quilted, I used this wonderful tutorial for the binding, from Make it and Love it. Doesn’t get much better than that. I just made sure my bias strips were long enough to fit around the entire quilt, like she directs in the tutorial.

I would love to hear if you try it out, or if you have tried something similar in your quilting adventures! I am on the lookout for a design for my next daughters birthday. I am thinking a strip quilt will be close to as easy as this one!

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Original article and pictures take http://www.tidbits-cami.com/2015/02/lazy-quilters-quilt-no-measuring-required.html site