Quick Quilt Tops 2022: Help us pick a design layout

March 1, 2022

These days, my hours are filled with running a quilt shop, publishing a magazine for the quilting industry, managing the family farm with my husband, and going to my three kids’ high school activities. So, when I sit down to sew, it’s a treat to work on an easy quilt that also takes advantage of chain piecing. (If you’re not familiar with this term, it’s simply sewing one unit, then—without lifting the presser foot—sewing right on to the next unit. You keep sewing until you have all of one type of unit sewn and then trim the threads between units.) Not only does piecing this way save thread and prevent thread jams on your machine, you can get in a meditative stitching groove, focusing on nothing but repetitive piecing and the whirr of the sewing machine.

To make the process of creating a quilt even easier, I went back to the basics when designing the next “Quick Quilt Series,” using just squares and rectangles (not a triangle in sight!). If you’d like to see the previous iterations of our Quick Quilt Series, check out the Half-square triangle and drunkard’s path blocks from the first two series and the “Y block” and four-patch blocks last year, which introduced a third patch that can create striking secondary designs.

At my quilt shop, Hen and Chicks Studio, we have been getting in lots of gorgeous fabrics that you don’t really want to cut into small pieces, because if you get too intricate with your quilt pattern, you lose the beauty of the fabrics. With that in mind, I chose a one-round Log Cabin block that is 9″ square. This results in a quick-to-make lap quilt that is great for featuring some more involved prints in its larger pieces.

We have also been seeing a lot of stripe fabrics arriving at the shop. When I was designing this quilt, I immediately thought of how the stripes would work in the rectangular pieces. I could see how cutting the stripes lengthwise (parallel to the long edge of the rectangles) or crosswise (parallel to the short edge of the rectangles) would change the look of the finished quilt.

I’ve created 10 different quilt pattern layouts using a one-round Log Cabin block. All the designs below use the same block and same color placement; rotating it creates the layout options. In addition to showing you each layout in grayscale, I put in some bright spring colors in a second version. Remember that the sky’s the limit on what colors you can use.

What do you think of the designs we came up with? Please vote for your favorite layout below. Once the votes are counted, we’ll sew up the most-popular layout and create some quilting designs for you to vote on again.

Finally, we’ll quilt up the quilt using the winning quilting design, and then we’ll give away the finished quilt to one lucky person! Scroll to the bottom of this post to vote for your favorite design layout.