Vertical Chevron Crib Quilt Tutorial

One of my goals in 2015 is to write more tutorials. I just as well get the year off to a good start! This tute is for a 32x48 crib size vertical chevron quilt and includes measurements and yardage requirements.

This is my fabric pull for the vertical chevron quilt plus solid white, fabric requirements below.

After selecting the fabrics, I grabbed my graph paper and sketched out the pattern. I guess I'm old school that way

For the 32x48 finished quilt you'll need 96 - 4 inch finished half square triangle (HST) blocks. I used this handy chart from Alyce at Blossom Heart Quilts. Alyce highly recommends adding a full inch to the Finished HST Size to get your Beginning Square Size. Totally agree, I much rather measure a full or half inch instead of 7/8 or 3/8. It's simpler and takes less time - I'm a fan of both of those things. There are several methods for making HST's I tend to use the Traditional Method even though it involves marking, which takes a little extra time. There is no waste and no sewing on the bias.

Now that we've got the the HST discussion out of the way...  We're needing 4 inch finished squares - so using the chart and a word from Alyce, we know that our Beginning Square Size is 5 inches. If you would like your quilt to look like mine with 2 aqua rows, 1 row of orange and grey and white rows between, you'll need the following number of 5 inch squares and yardage
48 White squares - 7/8 yard
24 Aqua squares - 1/2 yard
12 Grey squares - 1/3 yard
12 Orange squares - 1/3 yard

Once we have all of our squares nice and tidy, we can move onto getting the pieces ready for sewing. First we need to mark ALL of the white squares with a diagonal line using a ruler like so. Just take our pencil or marker and draw from corner to corner using a ruler! Don't skip this, it will save you time later. It's very easy to get 'off track' if you try to 'eye-ball it' without the line.

Now we have a line on each white square. This is NOT our sewing line. Instead grab a colored square and place it right side together with the white square so that you can see the line you have drawn.

Great, now we are going to sew a 1/4 inch seam on each side of the drawn lines. In other words each square will get the 1/4 inch treatment twice just like this

Using your ruler and rotary cutter, cut on the drawn line in the center.

You now have two individual blocks with 1/4 inch seams!

 

Now we need to iron them, you could iron them to one side or the other, but for this pattern I like to iron the seams open

Once we have our blocks with seams pressed it's important to go back and 'square up.' Remember when we added a little extra 'just in case' - this is the place we square up our blocks to 4 1/2 inches. Squaring up makes everything going forward a little easier by keeping the blocks all the same size.

If you have a square ruler this is a good time to use it, if not a regular ruler works just fine. Do this for every single block, all 96 of them at precisely 4.5 inch square.

Using your design wall (or the floor!) lay out the blocks in rows of 8 by 12 - if you made a graph for color placement, now's the time to use it! Here's a look at rows one and two of my finished quilt. Repeat this pattern 6 more times.

Using a 1/4 inch seam, piece together each row of 8. I use a scant 1/4 inch and trim the rows if necessary before attaching the next row until you have all 12 rows. Quilt and bind! You can see my finished vertical chevron crib quilt and coordinating pillow sham here. I used a charcoal minky backing. I'd love to see your finished vertical chevron quilt!

Link Parti's 

Take a look at the linki parti's I get down with here or by clicking on the Linki Parti's link above. Linking up to Show off Saturday