Simple Patchwork quilt of square fabric pieces

I took on another big textile project: a patchwork quilt made of square pieces of fabric to use as a bedspread. I imagined it would be simple. However, despite how simple it sounds, I had no idea how to go about it.

I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to create complicated patterns in the traditional patchwork style. I simply don’t have the patience for that and I still wanted to see the designs of each square when sewn together. Since most of my patterns have fairly large elements, that would have been difficult.

The choice of fabrics was clear. I still have a huge number of 15 cm x 15 cm test prints from my designs at Spoonflower, from which I have already sewn and given away quite a few shopping bags. But by now, most of my family and friends already own at least one or two of these bags. And also in combination with jeans upcycling, I was pretty sure that I would never be able to use up the many hundreds of prints. That’s why I came up with the brilliant idea that I could use a new bedspread for my bed, for which I would need 360 of the fabric squares.
So far, so good.

Initial Idea

The initial idea was to simply sew the prints together in rows according to their background colors to create a rainbow effect.

But I found that too boring, especially because most of it would have had blue, green, and beige backgrounds, which wouldn’t have really looked like a rainbow. So after completing the first third of rows, I unraveled the whole thing and started again.

Second Idea

The second idea is to sew four fabric squares together to form a larger one and then join them. I made a sketch for this. Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure what color some of the squares should have been. But never mind, it was only meant to be a rough sketch to sort the colors a little bit. In any case, as I mentioned above, I have significantly more blue and green designs than red or even yellow.

And so far, it doesn’t look too bad. Since this is obviously going to be a large patchwork quilt project, I’ll post here in sections for now. Mainly because I keep getting interrupted by more urgent projects, such as test sewing for my cut and sew projects for Lillestoff, but I’m confident that the quilt will be finished one fine day and I’m already excited to see how many times I’ll have to unravel and start again and what the end result will be.

How exciting !

What are you working on?