Quick Quilt Tutorial – Make a Super Fast Quilt

If you are looking for a quick quilt tutorial, you are in the right place!

This baby quilt is a combination of 4-patches and 9-patches and comes together in a snap.

Bold Colors

I recently wrote about quilt color palettes, and this quilt is part of that.  I made a very soft and pastel baby quilt last year, and as I was pulling scraps for that quilt, I had to keep pulling out scraps that wanted to be included but that were far too bold.

Then, I took out most of the blues, added in some of the pickle yellow/greens, threw together a quick quilt tutorial and finished it off with a bold polka dot binding.

Quick Quilt Tutorial – Cutting Strips

My quilt finishes at 42½” by 54½” which I think is a perfect baby sized quilt.  This quilt can easily be adjusted to make it larger, even King-size-bed-larger by adding additional blocks and rows.

Each block finishes at 6” in the quilt and this size quilt is made of 31 4-patches and 32 9-patches.

Cut 12 strips 3½” by width of fabric (WOF) from a variety of fabrics and colors.  I chose to sub-cut my strips to two 14½” pieces and an 11” for more variety (and because it’s hard to take photos of strips that are 40” long), but the quick quilt tutorial will work by leaving the strips WOF as well.

Cut 9 strips 2½” by WOF from the same variety of fabrics and colors, as well as 11 strips 2½” by WOF from white or neutral fabrics.  I used a handful of gray, blue and silver prints on white as I’m not a fan of solids. 

Like I did with the wider strips, I chose to sub-cut my 2½” strips to 10½” for more variety, but these strips could be left at WOF for most of the directions.  A total of 32 10½” pieces are needed from the colors and 40 from the white fabrics.

Quick Quilt Tutorial – Making 4-Patches

Sew the 14½” strips into pairs, and the 11” strips into pairs.  Mix and match colors and fabrics for maximum variety during this step.  I always press my strip sets away from the fabrics that were against the feed dogs while sewing the strip set.

Put two strip sets together and nestle the center seam.  This way you can cut the strips two at a time.  If you prefer to cut your strips one at a time, that works just as well.

Sub cut the longer strips into four 3½” pieces.  If you cut your strip sets two at a time, they are already ready to have a pin placed in that nestled seam and sewn into 4-patches that measure 6½” square.

If you cut your strips one at a time, pair up the little pieces, nestle and pin the seam and sew into a 4-patch.

Make 31.

Quick Quilt Tutorial – Making 9-Patches

Making 9-patches is almost as easy as making 4-patches!

Sew 24 colored strips to 24 white strips.  Press towards the colored strip.

Sew the remaining eight colored strips to the white side of eight strip sets.

Sew the remaining 16 white strips to the colored side of the rest of the strip sets.

You should have a total of 8 sets that are two colors with white in the middle, and 16 sets that are a colored strip surrounded by two white strips.

Like before with the 4-patches, match the seams of two strip sets as this will set you up for sub-cutting two strips at a time.

Sub-cut 4 pieces 2½” from each pair of strip sets.  Pin at each seam and sew the pairs together.

Cut the 8 remaining strip sets into 2½” units.

Sew these units to the side of the previously sewn pairs, to make a 9-patch that has four white squares in the corners and one in the center.  I aimed for the most variety in my colors in each individual 9-patch.  Make 32.

Putting the Quilt Top Together

Sew 27 4-patches to 27 9-patches.  For this step, there are no seams to match!  Press towards the 4-patches.

Make 5 rows that have four 9-patches and three 4-patches.  These will be the odd rows.

Make 4 rows that have four 4-patches and three 9-patches.  These will be the even rows.

Sew the rows together, nestling and pinning all seams.

And that is a very easy and fast baby quilt from a quick quilt tutorial!

It would be very easy to add additional strip sets to make more blocks for a larger quilt as well.

I used very, very bold colors for this quilt, what colors would you use?  I think this quilt would look striking with all of the variety of colors ratcheted down to just one color in a bunch of different prints.  This would help the neutral white to pop even more.