Creating a Rag Quilt Step 2

Shopping and Sizing material for the quilt.

James Healey

OK we need to pick the materials needed for our quilt. My first rag quilt was made for my son James.  He chose blue and brown as his colors.  My wife and I then headed off to the fabric store and bought 2 yards each of 2 blue and 2 brown fabrics.  I am useless for picking color, so left that all up to the wife.  We chose cotton fabrics for the top and a flannel for the back.  We had a single color for the back and bought 8 yards.  Any one that has done quilting long, may note that we had too much material but better safe then sorry and since I was sorry on the first few things I tried to do I opted for safe.  Oh one last thing we also needed batting.  We chose to do 6 inch blocks with a 1/2 inch seam for a total of 5 inches of finished blocks.  My original plan was to do 15 x 20 blocks (or 300 total) we ended up doing only 13 by 20 after sewing the first 13 rows together we tried it on my sons bed and its over lap was even more then i guessed so flipped the quilt on its side and sewed on 5 more rows of 13 rather then the 7 more rows of 15 I had intended to do.  With the 40 left over squares I made 2 matching 3x3 square pillows and a 4x5 row pillow case.  All in all the project was better then I had expected.  Through out the whole process I took a lot of pictures and will show them off here in the blog.