How I Am Attempting To Make A Quilt

Since I have never made a quilt before and my sister cannot possibly sit with me the entire time to figure it all out, I am winging it.

I will show you my mad method that I came up with to make this project.

Since I only had a bad cell phone picture of the quilt I was trying to duplicate, I had to guess at the pattern and size of the pieces.

First off, I estimated the quilt to be 3 foot square in size. I looked at the photo I had and looked for repetition in the pieces. After a time, I came up with this pattern above as the basis of a 12 inch square.

I then took that square and rotated it eight times to have a pattern of nine 12 inch squares in different directions.

I broke it down into pattern pieces and cut them out of graph paper. I gave each piece a letter to identify it.

Then each fabric was given a number so I could keep track of which fabric is used for each piece in each square.

I didn't pin the pieces to the fabric and cut with scissors like you normally do with patterns. Since it was all straight sides I put it on the cutting mat and used the rotary cutter. I put the graph paper pattern pieces on top of the fabric as I moved my yardstick around to make sure I was cutting the right size, then I held the yardstick down as a guide to cut a straight line. (I got into this cutting thing so much that I cut straight through the mat in into my table :(.  )

I gave each 12 inch square a number and as I cut the pieces of fabric, I piled them up together and identified them with their square's number.

Periodically, I would lay out all the pieces so I could make sure I liked the position of the fabrics and also to be sure it was random enough to spread fabrics out away from themselves.

It is all cut out and the next step is sewing it all together.
 

I hope you understand my rambling directions. For my first attempt at this, I probably should have just done squares. But I never like to settle for sanity. :)