A Block for a Beginner!

A couple of months ago I ran across a great sale on a fat quarter bundle of American Jane's School Days fabrics.  I love American Jane's fabrics because she uses such fun vibrant colors with a feel of vintage to them. This fabric line was perfect for making quilts for my kids elementary school teachers for their birthdays. I love getting a deal on a fat quarter bundle because you can really make quite a bit of quilt out of one bundle, depending on how many fat quarters are included. From this bundle, I have made two quilts so far, and I have plenty still left for a third. I wanted to show you a fun block I used for both of the quilts, and I feel it would be so easy for a beginner quilter. I threw both these quilt tops together in about two days of work and then machine quilted them at home on my machine and hand stitched the bindings. They both ended up around 50" square which is a really nice size for a throw quilt. Best of all both teachers loved them and seeing the excitement on my kids faces when they gave them to them, priceless!!


To start off you begin by cutting your fabrics into 5" squares. If you want to simplify this even further you could figure of the number of 5"squares you would need for your finished desired quilt size and buy the appropriate number of charm packs (remember these are packs of 5" squares.)




Next you will sew 9 of your 5" blocks together as shown in the picture. You sew 3 rows of three and then sew the rows together on top of one another.

Now the easy part, you line up your new large block (made up of your 9 squares) and cut directly down the middle horizontally as well as vertically. You now have 4 super scrappy blocks that look like you spent hours on them!! (Don't look too closely or you might notice I forgot to take a picture to show you how to cut them until after I had already sewn some together. For this reason, the top block doesn't exactly match, but I hope you can understand what I am trying to show you here.)

You can make so many different looking quilts with this form of block, and I love a neat scrappy quilt! The first quilt I made I used all these type of scrappy blocks and mixed and matched and then just sewed them all together. For the next quilt I sewed 9 of my 9 square blocks together for the center, added a border, and then used the scrappy blocks for the outside border, as shown in the pictures.

Have some fun getting creative and let me know if you have any questions or if this block works for some of your quilts!!