Back in February, I shared with you some ‘Basket-Weave’ blocks and how to make them. You can see the post here
This is the block:
The way the block starts to become effective, is if several blocks are made in similar colours and then joined together so that a basket-weave effect is produced across the surface of the quilt.
Since I wrote that post, more than 40 blocks came through my letter box, sent by my fellow quilters in the ‘Refuge Circle’ quilt group I belong to. It was very enjoyable opening all the packages to see the pretty blocks inside. Once they had all arrived, my first job was to start putting them up on my design wall to see how the blocks would go together to make quilts for my local Special Care Baby Unit at the QEQM hospital, Margate. The quilts for the babies need to measure 18 x 24″. This meant 12 blocks in each quilt, so there were enough to make four quilts.
I changed the layout a few times until there was a balance of blocks across each of the four quilts. There is one gap, as you see, so I knew I had one more block to make.
Once I was happy, I transferred the layouts one at a time onto a smaller board that I could lay on the work table next to my sewing machine.
I then chain-pieced block one to block two in each of the four rows, then three to two and finally block four to three, without cutting any of the joining threads. I then joined the rows and only press the whole thing at the end. You can check out the blog post here to see how this is done within a block – I just applied the same process to a little quilt.
I repeated the process with the remaining three quilts, then layered them up with 100% cotton wadding and quilted them simply with straight quilting lines. Here they are:
They have now been handed over to the coordinator who will take the quilts to the hospital to be given to the families of tiny babies in Intensive Care.
Here is a pattern for a regular-size cot quilt (that you could adapt to make a SCBU quilt yourself), called ‘Playtime’. Get the pattern here
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Amanda Jane Textiles 