Prayer Quilt - Pattern

You know how I've said that I'll be posting more tutorials on my blog? Well if you do, you'll also know that I haven't really been keeping my word on this, shame on me. 


Truth be told, there're so many other talented individuals out there that I'm often rendered a little intimidated to tutor anyone on anything, especially as I'm not much more than a beginner myself.


But promises are never made to be broken, so in this post I'd like to share a pattern. It's not so  much a tutorial, but I hope there's enough material for you to follow. This is the pattern for my Prayer Quilt, you can see a link to my post on it here.

This prayer quilt is a perfect little rug for reflecting upon in (inreasingly rare) quiet moments.

Note, I've never written a pattern before so please excuse any shortcomings. I'm not very precise - I know, I know, precision is key in quilting - but I normally just eyeball my way along. Also, the illustrations are just sketches, but I hope they're clear enough to understand.

So here we go!

Ingredients:

• 1 charm pack
• ¾ yard coordinating fabric for background
• ¼ yard binding fabric
• 1 yard backing fabric

 Cutting:

1. Centre Block - Choose 9 charms and set aside.

2. Medium Blocks - Choose 4 charms and set aside.  

(Centre and Medium blocks are highlighted in pink in the illustrative diagram below)

3. Small Blocks - Choose 4 charms and quarter each into 4 smaller squares of 2.5” X 2.5”.

(Blue in the diagrams)

4. Triangle border -
• Take 10 charms and cut once on the diagonal. Be careful not to stretch on the bias.
• Take another charm and cut twice down the diagonal, to yield four small triangles. These will be the corner triangles.

(Half square triangles are red in the diagram, quarter square triangles - yellow)  

5. From background fabric cut:

• 16 - 5” X 5” squares.

 • 2 – 14” X 5” rectangles (referred to as "A" in diagrams).

 • 4 – 9.5 X 5” rectangles (referred to as "B" in diagrams).

 • 16 – 3” X 5” rectangles.

 • 16 – 3” X 2.5” (small rectangles)

  

Construction
1. Take 1 of the small 2.5” X 2.5” squares and sew onto one 3” X 2.5” small rectangle.

2. Repeat for all 16 small squares and 16 small rectangles. 

3. Attach each pieced unit from step 2 to the 3” X 5” rectangle on the 5” edge. Repeat until you have 16 blocks that look like this:

 4. Referring to the diagram below, piece the prepared blocks into rows.

 5. Then sew each row together, like so:

6. For my Prayer Quilt I had charms left over from my charm pack, so I pieced some of these together into 2 rows, which I then attached to the (short) ends of the quilt to add some length. You can see this in the photo of the finished quilt. There's no rocket science there, you can piece them however you want, I did mine in rows of 2.5" squares.

7. Finally, you're ready to layer, quilt and bind.

And that's all there is to it! If you do give this a go, let me know, I'd love to see some photos.