Free Quilt Pattern: Subway Tile

July 20, 2021

Many quilters recognize the Tula Pink’s imaginative, bright and colorful fabrics. With a last name like “Pink”, how could they be anything less? As it turns out, Tula can also turn the colors of black and white into luscious fabric designs, too! When Tula’s new Linework fat quarter bundle arrived at APQS Dealer Teresa Owens’ shop, Cuppa Tea Quilting in Priest River, Idaho, those luscious black and white fabrics sparked her imagination.

Teresa wanted to create a fun and easy quilt for her customers that didn’t require cutting the fabric into lots of tiny pieces. She paired the new Linework fabrics with Tula’s True Colors fabrics, and the “Subway Tile” quilt was born

Made from either “Layer Cake” (a stack of 10-inch squares), fat quarters or 5/8-yard pieces of fabric yardage, this quilt goes together quickly. Since each “tile” is a generous 5” x 10” size, it’s perfect to showcase fabrics with larger motifs and design elements like the zebras and panda bears found in the Linework collection.

It is extremely versatile and would also look good as a scrappy quilt or would be a great way to use up your stash! The quilt pattern is for a lap size project. But since it’s constructed from two simple, alternating columns, it’s also easy to expand the quilt’s size by adding more rectangles in each row, or just adding more columns. In fact, Teresa added one more rectangle to each column and three more columns to increase the shop sample size.

It went together so quickly that she made a second shop sample featuring William Morris fabric from Free Spirit. She’s found that quilters like to create projects that are easy to assemble yet show off the beautiful fabric. The kits she’s created for the pattern are popular and make it easy for customers to whip up a quilt for themselves or a gift.

Teresa used her APQS Millie with Quilt Path to finish her Subway Tile quilt. The software makes it easy to do edge-to-edge designs as well as custom designs, but she felt that a soft, undulating wave was the perfect complement to the busy fabric and large rectangles in this project. She used an Aurifil 40wt Aqua thread to complement the Tula Pink fabrics.

Cuppa Tea Quilting has been in existence for two and a half years and is an APQS Mini-store that features three long arm machines – all available for customers to rent on an hourly basis. Teresa says that Millie is the most popular machine to rent because it is set up with Quilt Path, and her customers love to design a pattern specific to their quilt. Edge to edge designs are the most popular and the most economical.

As an APQS dealer, Teresa is there with the customers the entire time, so the process is not intimidating, and the quilt comes out perfect!