Some of my quilts have what I call a “broken grid” layout. You’ll also see it called an “alternate grid.”
Both of these terms refer to quilt layouts that aren’t the standard checkerboard-style grid, with all the seams running in straight, uninterrupted lines from edge to edge.
But I get a lot of questions about how, exactly, I quilt these quilts. Do I quilt around each square individually? Do I turn the corner to go around a block that’s interrupting my straight line?
Nope and nope. 🙂
At this point in the process I have my entire quilt sewn together and I want to do everything possible to avoid turning any corners while I’m quilting, because that means turning the entire mass of the quilt, and that is not fun.
So what do I do?
I hop over the block that’s blocking my way.
This video shows what I mean by that.
See?
Just hop right over those pesky blocks. 🙂
Do be sure to backstitch or knot – whatever technique you use to secure your threads – any time you have to stop or start quilting.
I’m using an example of one block from the Shiny Happy Houses quilt pattern, but you could adapt this idea in all kind of ways! I list a few possibilities at the end of the tutorial.
Step 1
Trace or print all your pattern pieces as usual. You’re going to do three things with your door piece.
Print or trace your door onto the fusible adhesive – just like normal.
Also trace your door onto a piece of freezer paper.
Also trace your door onto the fusible adhesive house piece – right where you want it to go.
Step 2
We’ll start with making the door itself.
Cut the door piece out of the freezer paper a little bit bigger all the way around. Do this neatly – it’s just to make the door a smidge bigger than the door opening. Mine is a little bit more than an extra 1/8″ all the way around.
Layer two pieces of door fabric right sides together and fuse the freezer paper door piece to the wrong side of the top layer.
Use the edge of the freezer paper as a guide and stitch almost all the way around the door, leaving a little bit open for turning on the side where the “hinges” would be. Don’t forget to backstitch at the beginning and end of your stitching.
Step 3
Trim around the door, leaving a small seam allowance.
Clip away the excess completely at the corners.
Step 4
Turn the door right side out through the opening. Smooth your curves, poke out your corners, and tuck the seam allowance at the opening inside and press the whole thing nice and flat.
I’ve got my turning stick going into the opening here so you can see where it is. 🙂
Now set the door aside for a bit.
Step 5
Fuse the house piece and the “behind the door” piece to the back of their fabrics.
Cut out the house piece right on the line – including cutting away the door that you traced.
Cut the “behind the door” piece right on the line at the bottom of the door. Leave a little extra fabric at the top and sides.
Here they are from the front after cutting them out. It’s fun to fussy cut something cute for the “behind the door” piece. 🙂
Step 6
Peel off the paper backings, layer all the pieces together, and fuse.
The “behind the door” piece should be tucked behind the door opening so that it peeks out.
Step 7
Outline all the pieces as usual.
You’ll only need to stitch around the door opening on the house piece – that stitching also secures the unicorn piece behind it.
Step 8
Sew the door in place by stitching down the side with the turning opening.
No hand sewing needed!
Finished!
Add a button doorknob if you like. 🙂
You can play with this idea in so many ways! Add shutters to the windows! Make a camouflaged “door” in a treetop (using the same fabric as the rest of the treetop) and hide a little bird or squirrel in there! I know someone out there has used the Shiny Happy Houses pattern to make a castle. Add a functioning drawbridge!
The possibilities are endless, and I can’t wait to see what you all make!
Here are links to all the posts showing how to applique with fusible adhesive – my favorite method. It’s fast and easy and (with the right materials) it holds up beautifully to rough use and repeated washing.
If you’re like most quilters – you have a LOT of patterns. 🙂
It’s always great to come up with another use for one of your favorites – especially if you can make an accessory to go WITH one of your best quilts.
You can turn a single block into a wall hanging and hang it just as it is. But it’s extra fun to give that block a special frame to really set it off and make it into a piece of art. 🙂
And it’s even more fun if that frame uses a wonky version of a traditional quilt pattern.
For this wall hanging I used one of my favorite blocks from the Cuddly Cats quilt pattern – no resizing. So it’s a 10 inch block in the center, with a wonky churn dash frame around it. The entire wall hanging is 16 inches square.
Press your batting square. Center your background block in the center of the batting.
Quilt the square to the batting.
I used double wavy stripes on mine. You can find a tutorial for that here.
Step 2 – Applique the Face
Applique the design to the block – being sure to line the lower edge of the applique up with the lower edge of the background block.
Add a backing to your wall hanging (I used spray adhesive to baste it to the batting) and outline your applique. Here’s a closer look at the placement and the outlining.
Cut four background corner pieces each 5 inches square. I used dark grey for mine.
Cut four right triangles with the legs (not the hypotenuse) anywhere between 4 and 5 inches long. The triangles should all be a little different.
Lay one triangle face down over the corner of one square, so that the points of the triangle (at each end of the hypotenuse) just hang over the edges of the square, as shown.
Sew the triangle to the square. Your seam allowance doesn’t need to be exactly 1/4 inch.
Make sure there is more than 1/4 inch between the points of the triangle and the edge of the background fabric square. That will make it impossible to accidentally chop off the points when you assemble the whole frame. 🙂 Yay for foolproof tricks!
Repeat for the other three squares, so you have the four corners of your churn dash block. The sizes and angles of the triangles should all be a little different.
Set them aside.
Step 6 – Preparing Background Rectangles
Cut four background strips 12 inches x 3 inches.
Cut four frame strips 12 inches x 2 1/2 inches.
Sew the frame strips to the background strips and then trim those rectangles down to 10 1/2 inches x 3 inches. Make the seam between the two strips go at a slight angle – and make all the angles a little different to make your finished block more interesting.
You can see my finished rectangles in the next step. See how some are wider than others? And they all slant a bit?
Step 7 – Laying Out the Churn Dash Block
Lay out all the churn dash components as shown.
Play around with the placement of the frame pieces until you’re happy with how things look.
Step 8 – Sew the Side Rectangles
Sew the side pieces of the frame to the sides of the block, sewing through the batting and backing too. For this and the rest of the project it’s important to use an accurate 1/4 inch seam allowance.
Press the side pieces open.
Step 9 – Sew the Top and Bottom Strips
Sew together the corners and strips for the top and bottom rows of the frame.
Press your seams in toward the strips – away from the corner triangles.
Step 10 – Finich Sewing the Churn Dash Block
Sew the top and bottom rows to the center of the block, being careful to line up the seams.
Press the whole block flat.
Step 11 – Quilt, Trim, and Bind
Quilt the frame if you want to. (It doesn’t need it structurally, so just do it for looks if you like.) I stitched in the ditch around the outside edge of the frame and that’s it.
Trim away the excess batting around the edges and bind your mini quilt.
Here are several free patterns that work with just some simple resizing. This post about making coasters has info about resizing an applique pattern that can be applied to any of these projects.
There are SO MANY different ways to outline applique pieces – and scribbly outlining is one of my favorites!
A lot of people applique with satin stitch or decorative stitching like blanket stitch. I demonstrate how to use decorative stitches in one of the lessons in my Fusible Applique Made Easy Class on Craftsy. Here’s an example of some of that stitching.
There’s blanket stitch around the bottom of the eyes, another stitch around the belly patch, and straight stitching everywhere else.
Fancy stitching can be fun, but I usually outline with a simple straight stitch and black thread. I love the cartoony look it gives and I think it really suits my applique designs. Plus it’s super easy!
(A lot of people worry that their fabric will fray if they just do a straight stitch outline. I posted a photo of one of my daughter’s quilts after over a year of constant use and many trips through the washer and dryer. Click here to see how it holds up.)
Sometimes, if I want a thicker line, I use a thicker thread. I like using 12 wt. thread from Sulky Petites and I’ve got a post here where I talk about what you need to do to work with thicker thread – what needle to use, what to use in the bobbin, etc.
Sometimes when I want a thicker line but I’m too lazy to change my needle (like maybe just on cat whiskers) I’ll use regular thread and go over the stitching two to three times, being careful to stitch right over the previous stitching so it looks like one solid, thicker line. You can see that in this cat.
I did most of the outlining with regular thread, but you can see the line is thicker on the whiskers and the mouth. That’s where I went over it a few times.
Lately I’ve been wanting to play around a bit with scribbly outlining, more like the lines in my sketchbook.
So I tried it! It took me a few blocks to get just the look I was trying for.
It took three rounds of stitching to get this look. Two just looked like a mistake – three looked intentional.
It’s kind of hard to deliberately go off the line! I’ve made hundreds of these blocks and by now it’s kind of automatic to follow the line as closely as possible. 🙂 I found it helped to deliberately ignore the line on pass two, to just pretend it wasn’t there and outline again as if it was a blank piece. Then on round three, if the first two lines were still too much on top of each other, I would deliberately veer off line. Make sure you cross over the line when you veer – you don’t want another line consistently inside or outside your original line. You want to cross over so sometimes it’s inside and sometimes it’s outside. That gives the best sketchy look.
Bonus! Four lines of scribbly outlining looks pretty much exactly like three. That means there’s no real benefit to doing four trips around the whole thing, but you can use that extra trip in some places to avoid having to start and stop to go around pieces like ears and muzzles and necks. For that snippet you see above, there are three rows of stitching around everything except the bit of the head that overlaps the ear. I went over that bit four times so I could stitch the ear without ever having to stop and tie a knot.
Here are links to all my posts about outline stitching.
Cut a piece of fabric big enough for the full four inch square to fit flat in a hoop. A seven inch square of fabric should work just fine.
Stitch the design on your quilt label. I used 4 strands of thread and two simple stitches – backstitch for all the lines, and satin stitch for the solid eyes and nose.
If you want to add a date – or maybe a name – there’s a free alphabet embroidery pattern here – with letters that are relatively simple to stitch, with no serifs, curlicues, or extra-tight curves. 🙂
When you finish stitching, trim the fabric so there’s about an extra inch all the way around the part you want to show as the quilt label. Fold about 1/2 inch under on each side and press.
Position the label where you want it (I always put mine in the lower right corner) and pin or glue it in place to hold it secure while you stitch it.
Stitch the label to the quilt back all the way around the edge, being sure to only stitch through the quilt backing. Don’t let your stitches go through to the front of the quilt. I like to use ladder stitch.
That’s it!
It doesn’t take long and it’s a really nice finishing touch. 🙂
Here are all my posts about how to bind and finish your quilt.
A lot of people have questions about how to applique dark eyes on a dark face. It’s really important for the eyes to show up well, and dark on dark fabric tends to hide them!
Of course – living in Appalachia – I had to make a black bear.
But black bears are tricky!
Black eyes didn’t show up every well on the almost-black fabric I chose for the bear face.
The solution is to make an extra layer in a lighter color to back the eye.
Black bears usually have a cinnamon-colored snout, so I chose the same fabric to go behind the eyes. If your applique pattern doesn’t have a contrasting snout color (maybe you want to make a black cat from this pattern?) then just choose a slightly lighter shade of the face color.
I don’t recommend white. It will usually make your finished face look frightened. 🙁
Here’s what to do.
Using a scrap of your fusible adhesive, trace the eyes again. Fuse that to the back of the fabric you want to use to define the eyes.
When you cut them out – cut them a little bit bigger than the eyes you’ve traced.
I’ve cut mine with a little less than an extra 1/8 inch all the way around. You don’t have to measure it – you really just want a sliver of that color showing.
Now – fuse those pieces in place – along with all the other pieces on the block except the black eyes.
DO NOT FUSE DOWN THE BLACK EYES YET.
I know. It looks a little creepy at this point.
I usually outline all my applique pieces in black thread – but this is the exception. Stitch down the eye backings using matching thread.
If you do it now, you can be a little wobbly with your stitching. There’s no black eye for the wobbliness to show up against. If you fuse the black eye before you do the outlining you have to be very careful to keep your stitching right on that sliver of background color showing – and that would be hard.
Here’s a close up view where you can hopefully see my stitching. It’s just a simple straight stitch.
NOW you can applique the dark eyes and do all the rest of the outline stitching in black thread.
Whew! Much less creepy. 🙂 And look how nicely her eyes show up – without looking frightened.
Here are links to all the posts showing how to applique with fusible adhesive – my favorite method. It’s fast and easy and (with the right materials) it holds up beautifully to rough use and repeated washing.
Quilt layouts can be very simple – or very complex.
When I design a quilt pattern I always make up a sample – usually a simple grid.
But if you think of my quilt patterns as patterns for collections of blocks that you can put together any way you like – it opens up all kinds of other possibilities!
In this video I show a few different quilt layouts you can use for almost any of my patterns. It’s a long video because I’m talking you through the whole process, but you can scroll past the video to see lots of photo examples with shorter descriptions.
For each layout style, you’ll find a downloadable PDF with fabric requirements, cutting instructions, assembly diagrams and more for six different sizes in this post – Quilt Sizes and Supplied Needed (I Did All the Math).
This is a long post with lots of photos. Don’t want to scroll through the whole thing? Use these links to jump right to info and examples of each layout style. . .
Most of my quilt patterns default to this, and you can simplify the ones that don’t by just leaving out any half or double size blocks. Here’s an example using the Wild Flowers quilt pattern.
This kind of grid is the easiest to sew up. Just sew together all the blocks in each row, then sew all the rows together. Easy peasy.
You can fancy up the quilt design a little bit by adding in some blocks from other patterns (almost all my patterns are designed for 10-inch squares so it’s easy to mix and match) or – if it’s a quilt with faces – by adding some Fancy Doodads accessories.
This is a great way for you to add some of your own creativity, but still have a quilt that’s really easy to assemble.
What if you’re in a hurry?
Checkerboard Grid
You can make a quilt where you only applique half the blocks. The other blocks are just quilted. Here’s a great example of that with an Arctic Chill quilt made by Lisa.
And here’s an example of the Woodland Critters quilt assembled with alternating plain blocks.
Grid with Sashing
Maybe you want to add sashing to your quilt!
That’s really easy to do – it’s still a simple grid assembly. The hardest part is the math to figure out how the sashing changes the number of blocks needed and how much fabric you need to buy – and I’ve done all that for you in this post.
Here’s a fairy traditional grid and border layout. I used the Noisy Farm pattern but left out all the half blocks, and added sashing.
You can also just add sashing between rows or columns instead of sashing around each block. I built that design into the Dinosaurs pattern.
But you can do that with any pattern!
Your stripes can go tall too, instead of wide. Here’s the morning glory block from the Wild Flowers pattern repeated in tall stripes with sashing between them.
Wide Stripes
Of course, you can set your quilt in long stripes without adding sashing – and you don’t have to have that stripe filled up with applique either. Look at the fun striped quilt Linda made with the Mix & Match Monsters pattern!
Wonky Faux Sashing
You can also add wonky faux sashing to any quilt.
All the blocks are off-kilter and irregular so it looks like it would be really hard to assemble, but actually it’s still just a simple grid. Here’s an example made by Kathleen of a bunch of blocks from the Funny Faces Quilt Block of the Month Club (plus a couple of chickens of her own design), set with wonky sashing.
Now, on to the most complicated thing you can do to vary the setting of your quilt (which still isn’t really hard to do). You can break up that simple grid.
You can do that in two ways.
Alternate Grid with Double Blocks
The first way is designed into some of my patterns – using double-size blocks. You can see that in the Sea Creatures pattern.
Alternate Grid with Half Blocks
Double-size blocks are pretty hard to do if the pattern doesn’t already include those sizes. But it’s REALLY EASY (and even more effective) to add some half-size blocks to any pattern.
Word blocks like these are one of my favorite ways to add half blocks to a quilt pattern that doesn’t include them. There’s a free ABC applique pattern here that you can use to add sounds, names, birth dates, and more. Here’s a version of the Bunches of Bears pattern where I added words.
Here are several free patterns that work with just some simple resizing. This post about making coasters has info about resizing an applique pattern that can be applied to any of these projects.
The suggestions here are really just the tip of the iceberg. If you do a unique quilt layout I’d love to see it! Share a photo in the Shiny Happy People group. 🙂
Find links to all the posts about pattern size and layouts here.
The technique for 3D quilts is basically the same – but it’s a tiny bit more involved because applique template pieces have no seam allowances – and you need to account for that if you’re going to sew them into flappy ears.
Don’t worry – it’s easy. I show you how to do it in this video.
Here are links to all the posts showing how to applique with fusible adhesive – my favorite method. It’s fast and easy and (with the right materials) it holds up beautifully to rough use and repeated washing.
I almost always use scrappy bindings in my quilts and I get a lot of questions about how I get those diagonal seams.
I show the diagonal seam in my video How to Bind a Quilt – but I never actually showed how to do it.
Until now.
See how easy that is?
I use this method any time I’m joining strips together. For me that’s usually binding a quilt, but it can also be for bias strips on bags, clothing, and any other application.
Choosing fabric for a quilt can be tricky – especially when you’re doing applique!
When I showed the lovely fabrics I was planning to use for this free receiving blanket pattern, a couple of people said they were eager to see how I used the prints, since I usually stick to solids and near-solids.
The reason I usually stick with solids and near-solids is because they’re so much easier to work with! Especially for applique where you don’t want the design to get lost in the background fabric. It’s soooo easy to end up with a block that you’re not happy with!
So – here’s the fabric.
It’s the Into the Woods collection from Michael Miller Fabrics, sadly out of print now. But you’ll see a similar collection of fabric types in almost all quilt collections – some tone-on-tone small prints, some multicolored medium-scale prints, and some multicolored large-scale prints.
Gorgeous, right? Especially that larger scale print with the foxes and foliage.
But that’s exactly the print I didn’t want to use for my background. I used it for the back of the receiving blanket instead.
Why?
Because it contained all the colors I wanted to use in my applique fox face.
To show you why that would be a problem, I cut out a wonky little oval from the main fox color and laid it on that pretty fabric.
You can see the oval just fine, right?
Yes, but your brain is actually kind of fighting to see the oval. Your brain wants to merge all the same colors into one shape, so it actually sees a shape like this.
See?
(This tendency is what makes it so much fun to play with negative space in traditional quilt designs. Your brain wants to merge those spaces together into new shapes.)
Again – you can still see the oval. It’s just that you’re having to overcome your brain’s natural tendency to see something else, and that will make for a less successful design overall.
That doesn’t mean you can’t use fun prints. It just means that when you’re choosing fabric for a quilt, you have to pick your background very carefully. Here’s what I ended up choosing.
That pretty floral fabric I used in the background has dark blue, light blue, and green. No orange or gold or white – the colors in the fox applique. The green and gold are awfully similar – but ultimately I decided they were different enough for the combination to work.
And I still got that pretty fox and foliage print in there – just on the back of the blanket where it wouldn’t muddle the applique. 🙂
These color lessons apply to more than applique. Think about embroidering on a printed fabric, or using a print for a softie, or even a variegated yarn for a crochet amigurumi – the same color “rules” apply.
