Christmas Time Rag Quilt Tutorial

Are you in the holiday mood yet?? I hope that you are all getting some much needed vacation time from work to spend relaxing and enjoying the season!! 

I promised you a quilt tutorial and a tutorial is what you will get!!

A Rag quilt is a little different than a normal quilt because you quilt each piece as you go. So instead of the large "Quilt Sandwich" with the pieced top, batting and full back; you have many small "Quilt Sandwiches" that are pieced together to form a whole quilt. The "Rag" part comes from trimming the seams after all the piecing is done to have a fringe look on the pieced units. 

The Finished Quilt

This quilt was made for my parents last Christmas, I designed the whole quilt. It turned out to be about 60" by 60" when fully completed. A lot of this quilt was made from fleece and it is soooo snuggly and warm!!

Unfortunately, I used a lot of scrap fabric and some fat quarters to fill in the missing spots so I can't give you exact size measurements... I will get better at this, but I would recommend that you plan out your quilt before you start cutting. Each square of fabric was 5" by 5" and this included the backing (all the same fabric, I used a soft red fleece seen below) and the batting.

This is the soft backing fabric

Start by planning the size of your rag quilt. I initially thought that I would make a lap quilt, but once I got started, the project took on a mind of it's own and then the large two person snuggle quilt was born!! 

I knew that I had a few different pieces of fabric that could work from my scrap pile but I also wanted to find some fun fabric that was personalized to my parents (such as the sports fabric and the lovely letter fabric and the fleece of course!!)

Planning page with the fabric diagrammed out

 As you have probably figured out by now I am a visual person and I love to play things out before I start just so that I know I will be happy with the end project. Well, I never want to cut and then be upset about how the piece looks and waste fabric, so I always doodle a little and sketch the initial layout of my fabric in the quilt. That is the rickshaw drawing above (not my best artwork but it gets the job done ;))

This is half of the quilt top squares all laid out before I start to piece them together

I do not have the remainder of the pictures because I completed the quilt and moved on before I had thought about the blog side of things. My apologies, again I am new to all of this so please forgive me lol :).

The simplest thing is to have all of your pieces cut out before you start. That ended up being about 432 squares ;) 144 squares per layer and there are three layers. Then all you do is piece each together with a simple X stitch from corner to corner, so then you have 144 small quilt sandwiches.

Once you have all of these block laid out and ready to go in the pattern that suits you best, start seaming them together with the back sides together. This way you will have the open seams facing the top of the quilt. Now that you have all of these seems all over the front of the quilt... do you think man this looks like a mess?? well so did I! haha then you know what I did... I got to snipping I trimmed all the seams 1/4 of an inch apart so that it fringed out and looked a whole lot softer and a little more worn, like a well loved blanket (which it has 100% become!).

The small cuts take a lot of time so go slow and take breaks or you may get a few blisters on your cutting hand... I know this from personal experience ;)... Who knew quilting was such a rough sport??? ;)

Now throw this amazing quilt in the wash and then add your personal tag so that people know it is from you and you are good to go!! The perfect rag quilt (I will make another one soon, so that I have some step by step pictures). You get the jist right now and there will be more to come!!

I hope that you have your favourite blankets out there, and if you don't maybe keep this one in mind the next time you get the itch to stitch ;)

Enjoy!!

-Happy Crafting-

-xo-