A few years back I was rifling through the stock at Reverse Art Truck and found some curtain swatch books. One contained samples of flanelette fabric.

I grabbed it because the fabric was soft and said ‘sew these squares into a blanket’ to me. Quilting has never interested me, despite having several friends over the years who enjoyed it. I admire other people’s work but I’ve not been tempted to do it myself… except the occasional quilting-ish project. Like when I saw knitting blogger made a simple rough-edged blanket a few years back.

A few months ago I decided it was time to try it when I saw this tutorial via Pinterest for a ‘Jelly Roll Quilt‘ which uses much the same method. I bought some dark blue flanelette to back the pieces and some batting. The beauty of this method is the fabric, batting and backing are sewn together all at once. But you do need to sew the three together beforehand for stability.

Instead of lines across the squares, I decided to sew around the leaf shapes by hand. Then I traced them off and used them as templates on the rest of the pieces.

When they were all stitched up I brought out the machine and got sewing. Squares together then once around the outer edge to finish. Exposed edges snipped with pinking shears. Done.

The front:

And the back:

It’s a lap blanket size, which is fine because that’s what gets used the most here.

The hand stitching of the leaf shapes took the longest, yet I enjoyed that part the most. It’s one of the prompts that had me trying some embroidery. One tip I would give anyone thinking of trying this is to hand sew the batting down before washing the quilt, as it tends to bunch up inside the squares.

Now that this project is done, I’m thinking of turning the curtain fabric swatch book samples (on top of the flanelette sampler on the right of the first pic above) into throw pillows. I need to find some similar fabric to add some contrast, and I’m thinking of doing strips – and perhaps adding some embroidery.