Quilt Details
- Skill level: easy
- Finished quilt size: 55″ x 73″ (140 x 185 cm)
- Finished block size: 9″ square (11.5 cm square)
My family has a long-standing tradition of watching our old favorite holiday movies at Christmas time. Quilts are an indispensable part of our holiday movie experience.
How much fun would it be to watch The Snowman or The Preacher’s Wife or Elf or Christmas in Connecticut without a warm quilt to snuggle up in? (And popcorn and hot chocolate, of course.)
This easy Christmas Bows quilt is the perfect size for wrapping up in on the couch when the weather gets cold. It is made from large pieces that show off the fabric and are easy to sew. Read on to learn everything you need to know to make the quilt.
Fabric Yardage
Fabric to Cut
Step by Step Instructions
- Cut all the fabric as shown in the cutting chart above.
- Make 24 half-square triangle blocks from the red and white 10″ squares. Trim the blocks to 9-/12″ square. Learn how to make half-square triangle blocks.
- Lay out the blocks as shown in the diagram below, alternating squares and triangle blocks.
- Sew the blocks together. You can either sew them row by row, or save thread by chain-piecing them column by column.
- Layer the backing, batting, and quilt top together and baste the three layers for quilting. Spray basting is my favorite, but there are also a number of other ways to baste your quilt.
- Sew the quilt layers together. When the fabric is interesting in its own right, I like to do very simple quilting so the stitching doesn’t overpower the fabric. (Also, I’m lazy and like to get the quilt done quickly.)
For this quilt, I first stitched all the seam lines in the ditch to secure the layers together so the quilt will remain stable when it gets washed and dried. Learn how to stitch in the ditch.
Next, I stitched a very simple straight-line star in the off-white blocks, using my walking foot, and sewed free-motion stipples in the white sections of the triangle blocks. - Square up and bind the quilt.
A Note on Backing Fabric
I like to back my cold-weather quilts with polyester fleece. The quilt shown in the photos has a single-layer fleece backing instead of the standard batting/backing fabric combination.
There are several advantages to using fleece, which you can read about here. I liked it for this quilt because fleece is typically wider than the 42-inch quilt fabric typically used for backings, so I didn’t have to do any piecing to make my backing fabric fit the quilt.
One potential disadvantage: the color and pattern on the backing fabric shows through a pale or white fabric like the ones I used in this quilt. You can see the show-through in some of the pictures on this blog post. The show-through doesn’t happen if you include a batting layer in your quilt. Just keep that in mind if you decide to use fleece and omit the batting layer.