Four Square Contruction

A couple folks have been asking me how I put together the Four Square quilt that I recently published on the Modern Quilt Guild Facebook page. I thought I'd put together some quick instructions for how I constructed it.

I'll break the instructions down into the following parts:

Design & Color Choices

Breakdown of Design for Piecing

Piecing

Quilting

Binding

Note that the finished size of this quilt is ~60x60.

Design & Color Choices

I designed this quilt on Corel Draw on my Mac (which I no longer use because it's pretty buggy on the Mac and the Mac version is no longer supported by Corel). If you are interested in learning how to design your own quilts using an inexpensive software package that you probably already have on your computer, checkout the Fresh Lemon's tutorial for using Adobe Photoshop. I now use Adobe Illustrator because I was able to get an inexpensive version through my job.

Four Square Quilting

Whew! Finally got my 'Four Square' top quilted! It's an original design that I came up with a while back based on my love of squares. I had two motivations for getting it quilted. The first is that I wanted to enter it into the Modern Quilt Showcase in Houston this year. The second is that I was fast approaching my third trimester (yes, I'm pregnant!) and was already starting to have problems reaching over my longarm!

At first I was going to do some straight line quilting on it. But when I tested out some straight line designs, they just looked too plain. Then my husband suggested I used some spirals or concentric circles. At first I totally opposed the idea. I mean, why would you want to ruin something so perfectly square by putting circles in it, right? But then when I auditioned a couple circular designs, I found that I could do the circles in a way that really complimented the squares. I'm really happy I listened to his advice and love the way the quilt turned out.

AMQG Block of the Month

For the winter AMQG retreat I decided to bring all my UFOs. I got so much done it was great. As always it was a great time...even though I could not participate in 'boobin' drinking game!

Finally got my (2011) AMQG block of the month blocks (left) done! Woo hoo!!! I also got a couple more Summer Sample blocks done (right). Even though it's now winter, I was still happy to have time to work on them! Can't wait to finish the rest.