How to make the rag quilts

My friend Shenna taught me how to make a rag quilt last year. You can find that post here. http://blessedfamilyblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/my-rag-quilt-is-done.html I love my rag quilt. When it's cold enough I sleep with it every night.

It's hard to explain in a short amount of time how to make these, but I will give you tips on what I did for mine. I like mine to have 8x8 squares when I'm done, so I start with 10x10 squares. I tried to pick eight different patterns and bought about a yard and a half of each giving me twelve yards. For Miranda's I only had five different patterns, but figured out my pattern kind of by accident. I had bought a green that really didn't go with it once we had it laid out.

Steps.

1. Buy your FLANNEL fabric. At Joanne's you can find fabric at $2.50 a yard when there is a sale. On some of my quilts the fabric was almost $8.00 a yard. Yeah. Spendy.

2. Buy some warm and natural batting for the middle of your squares. Your batting will be cut into 7 1/2 x 7 1/2 squares. You will need 63 squares of batting and 63 squares of fabric. (If you're making them the size I made them.)

3. DO NOT WASH YOUR FABRIC. I repeat DO NOT WASH YOUR FABRIC. Did you hear me? :-) You are going to cut your fabric. It helps if you have a rotary cutter and some quilting cutting tools. (You can tell I'm a real professional here.)

I used this as a refresher course and an idea for the primary block rag quilt. http://jenyu.net/pj/stuff/ragquilt/

4. Cut your batting with your scissors. I thought it was easier.

5. Take all your cut-up squares to a large area and lay them out according to how you want your quilt to look. There will be seven squares across and nine down, giving you 63 squares. Ask for help from someone to see if there is anything you should change. (You can do the back in either one color, the same as the front, or the same fabrics as the front but in a completely different pattern.)

6. Gather them up by rows and number them so you don't lose where you're at later. You're going to label the first row with a 1 and then the next six across under it. Then place the 2 on the first one in the second row and place that whole row under the first row. You'll have a stack of squares when you're done.

7. Take the first square and a square of batting. Place the batting in the square and you're going to sew an X from corner to corner, and then corner to corner. Stack however you're going to be able to keep track of where you're at. I turned the first one over and stacked the second one on it, and then when I was done I turn the whole stack over.

8. Then you're going to sew the first square to the second square, with the seams up and the third square onto the second square and so on until you have seven squares. Lay each row in order so you don't lose your place. Easy to lose track. Trust me. :-)

9. Then you will take row 1 and sew it to row 2. I use pins at this point to help keep my seams somewhat straight, although as much as I would try they weren't always lined up. Remember all your seams are on top. Sew until all nine rows are attached.

10. Sew a one inch seam around the whole quilt.

11. Start cutting. Take special care not to cut too close which is really easy to do with those little sharp scissors. Sarah cut too close on one of ours that we made and I spent more time fixing it than the time I originally spent sewing it. And make sure you are cutting your outside seams all the same way. It's hard to explain, but you want your outside seam to be cut the direction of where you're at. You should be able to cut straight on.

12. Once cut wash in normal and dry in normal. Make sure you have a really good machine or take it to the laundry mat. Our washer got plugged up after washing four of these. It gets really linty in the dryer too.

13. After you take it out of the dryer, take it outside and shake all the loose lint off. Then get a lint roller and roll off what you can and at the same time check for any holes, especially where all the seams come together.

One idea I had was to go on ebay and check out the ones people were making to sell. I copied and saved the pics to my computer so that I had some ideas for other quilts I might want to make.

I hope that answered some questions. Google in Rag Quilts and you should be able to come up with a wealth of info. Happy sewing!