Shag Quilt Post 1

I am in the process of making my first shag quilt. I took photos, so that you can follow along. I hope it inspires you to make one of your own! Since this is the first quilt of this kind that I have made, I am just guessing at some things & using other websites as loose guidelines. This project is pretty simple to customize to your liking, so change the color, change the size of the squares, change the fabric type & change the finished size to suit your needs. These are just the steps I took to make it.

Step 1: Go shopping & buy pretty fabric. I bought one yard each of 8 different fabrics & two yards of the turquoise, for the backing. I won't be using all eight yards for my quilt, but I will explain more about how to figure the yardages you will need later.

Step 2: Wash & dry fabrics, sorted by light & dark colors. I use Shout Color Catcher quite a bit in my bright or dark colored laundry, especially on new fabrics like these.

Step 3: Iron it. All of it.

Step 4: Figure out how many squares can be cut from the fabric purchased. Now I guess most logical people would figure out what size quilt & what size squares they would like & then purchase their fabric accordingly, but as you can see....I'm not most people. I just randomly bought what I thought was pretty & figured I could make something out of it.

If your fabric is 45" wide, decide what size blocks you want to have in your quilt. I decided that I would get the most out of my fabric by having 5 1/2 inch blocks. To allow for my seam allowance, I cut my squares 6 & 1/2 inches by 6 & 1/2 inches. I did not start taking photos with my new camera until after I had all of my fabric cut, so if you have not used a rotary cutter before & you need detailed instructions on this step, click here.

Once you have decided what size squares you want, decide how much of a seam you want showing. My quilt will have 1/2 inch around each square, so look at my photos later & see if you like the way it looks. If you want a 1/2 inch seam showing, add 1 whole inch to your block size when you cut it, so that once it is sewn, each side will have a 1/2 inch.

Since I have 8 different fabrics, my quilt is going to be 8 blocks wide, using each color only once. After they were all cut, I took the number of turquoise squares I had & divided that by 8, to find out how many rows I could get out of my backing fabric. This number came to 11, so my quilt will be 8 blocks wide by 11 blocks tall.

Next I will show you the batting.