Planning My First Quilt…

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I’ve been interested in quilting for a long time now, but didn’t take any action towards actually making one while a few weeks ago. I’ve been watching YouTube videos about quilting—mostly from the Missouri Quilt Company, who features some excellent tutorials. These got me inspired and I started looking everywhere on the internet for more inspirations. I collected a few photos from quilts I likes and narrowed them down to three quilts I want to make:

“City Scapes” by Cherry House Quilts was my favorite… but I think I will not attempt this until maybe my second or third try.

“Tokyo Subway Map Quilt” by Elizabeth Hartman is another that I like, and she offers a step by step quilt-alone that you can follow. I think I’l also make this as my second or third quilt.

“Disappearing Nine Patch Quilt” was one that I thought would be a good one to start with. It’s pretty simple, but not just a simple grid. Missouri Quilt Company offers a tutorial on YouTube. There is also a tutorial on Allison Harris’ blog Cluck Cluck Sew. I found a photo of one made by Ann-Marie on Flickr, who uses a similar color palette that I want to use… but I wanted something a little different and thought that maybe I can separate the quarters apart and divide them with white borders, similar to this lap quilt by Lynds0517 on Flickr.

I started buying various fabrics, mostly quarters. Many greens, blues and purples. I also bought various quilting supplies like a rotary cutter, various sizes of rulers and luckily I still had a self healing cutting mat from my old work that I rediscovered.

I also bought quarters of reds, oranges, grays and yellow in preparation to make the Tokyo Subway Map Quilt. Luckily Hancock Fabrics had a 50% OFF sale for the New Year, so I snagged several quarter yards and saved a bundle!!! I think I went there a total of three times to look for different colors.

So a few days ago I started cutting the greens, blues, grays and purples for the Disappearing Nine Patch Quilt. I got a total of 24 colors—three 5″ x 5″ squares cut out for each. I didn’t know how much I needed so I drafted a sketch:

My First Quilt (Sketch/Planning)

I calculated that I needed a total of 162 5″ x 5″ squares to make the 88″ x 90″ quilt that I want to make. I hope I did the calculations and sizes correctly.