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.

Endless Squares

Whenever we are redo-ing a room in our house and have to consider the design of an object in it, my husband always knows what I will say: 'I don't care, as long as it's square!' I really do love squares! I only like curves when they are accompanied by or are complimenting squares or something with hard edges. So when I was thinking about what I wanted to do for my next quilt design, I decided to make it a play on squares.

I came up with the design above. And while piecing it, I even did the thing I swore I would never do again....iron the seams open. In this case, the small squares were so small (1" finished), they were easier to keep square when they were ironed open. Two things made making the open seams a better experience than my previous one. First, I shortened the stitch length on my machine from 2.4 to 2.1. Second, thanks to a tip from fellow modern quilter, Judy, I used spray starch when ironing the seams. Between these two things, I had a much more pleasant seam opening experience. That being said, I still prefer to iron my seams to one side wherever possible!

Now, on to figuring out how the heck to quilt this thing!?!