Got all your puff quilt prep from Part 1 finished? If so, it’s time to sew!
Because expectation management is important, I’ll tell you right now that unlike a lot of quilt projects, in which cutting and prepping your pieces always seem to take way more time than it does to sew them, with this puff quilt, it takes WAY more time to sew than it did to prep–and it took a lot of time to prep!
Sewists on the interwebs don’t call this puff quilt project a labor of love for no reason!
By the time we finished Part 1 of this puff quilt tutorial, I’d walked you through how to design your puff quilt via the pixel quilt method, how to calculate how many front and back pieces you’d need, and how to measure and cut them. For instance, for my 88″x112″ quilt made up of 4″ squares, I needed to cut 616 4″ squares that nobody will see because they’ll make up the back of each puff piece, and 616 4.5″ squares that will be the front side of each puff piece. Of those 616 4.5″ squares, I needed to also make sure that I had the correct number of background pieces and feature pieces for my design, so I needed 330 black 4.5″ squares, and 286 4.5″ squares from any other color or print.
Here’s what else you’ll need to finish sewing your puff quilt!
Materials
To finish sewing this puff quilt, you will need:
- backing fabric. I know there’s a ton of heated debate about the suitability of using sheets as quilt backs, but I unabashedly back almost all my quilts with thrifted cotton sheets. I quilt or hand-tie everything myself, though–if you send your quilts to a long-armer, you need to ask about their personal policy on using sheets.
- fiberfill. The amount you’ll need depends on the size of your puff quilt, but I ended up using about .1-.2 ounces of polyfill per block in this quilt. Cotton fiberfill is the most eco-friendly, but after a lot of dithering I did end up choosing polyester fill instead. I feel a little gross about it, but I’m very familiar with polyfill so I knew exactly how it would behave in this quilt, and I just wasn’t willing to experiment on something this big. Maybe I’ll make that a project for the autumn!
- sewing supplies. I did all the sewing on a home sewing machine, although the puff quilt did get soooo heavy and bulky towards the end. You’ll have a bunch of invisible seams making the puff pockets for this quilt, so it’s a great time to use up the weird thread colors you bought for a single project four years ago. Otherwise, go with matching thread for the parts that will be seen.
- floss or yarn for tying. I always hand-tie with embroidery floss, which I know is another controversial decision, but I’m a rebel!
- washable white glue. I learned how to do glue basting early this summer, and it’s my favorite thing ever! I just use my kids’ old washable Elmer’s white glue, and it’s always worked great.
Step 1: Sew all the puff pockets.
I hope you’ve got an audiobook or a TV series that you love for this step–I got through QUITE a bit of Onyx Storm during this project, and tangent, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on the ending, because I have a pet theory about it.
Arrange a big stack of your 4.5″ front pieces, another big stack of your 4″ back pieces, and put whatever thread you like in your sewing machine. I volunteer monthly to mend items for the community, which means that once a month I come home from Mending Day with every bobbin I own partly filled with thread in random colors that happened to match whatever random things I was mending that day, and it’s always annoying to find a useful way to empty those bobbins before my next Mending Day. Well, it turns out that sewing these quilt puffs was the BEST way to use up every last centimeter of random thread that I own, because this step involves a LOT of sewing, and NONE of it will be visible in the finished product!
To make each puff, you’ll put a 4″ and 4.5″ square WRONG SIDES TOGETHER, and you’ll sew around three sides using a SCANT 1/4″ SEAM. Let me tell you that again:
- Wrong sides together. Right sides facing out.
- Scant 1/4″ seam. That means that your stitching should be a little less than 1/4″ from the edge.
To get the 4.5″ front side to match the 4″ back side, at the start of every side that you sew, you’ll pleat by hand that 4.5″ side to match the 4″ side. Ideally, the pleat will be centered on that side, but let me tell you that I made ALL kinds of wonky pleats whenever I’d get distracted by some of Violet’s hijinks, and you cannot tell in the finished quilt.
And remember, you’re only doing this to three sides. Leave one side completely open.
This is also a good step to chain stitch. Bonus points if you’ve got a partner who doesn’t mind doing the scut work of cutting 616 pieces of thread while watching TV. We’re quite the multi-taskers over here!
Step 2: Arrange your design and put your quilt puffs in rows.
Even if you’re going for an all-over random look, not a specific design, I still think it’s nice to lay out all the puffs and make sure you like the look. Otherwise, it’s too easy to have a section that has all the purple and accidentally have two yellow stripe pieces touching each other, etc. This is also a good spot check to make sure you actually did sew the correct amount of quilt puffs, because for some reason having to go back at the very end of a project to make up one last forgotten block is the most annoying thing I can possibly experience, ugh. It’s even worse than not realizing that my bobbin ran out two minutes ago!
Once you’re happy with your overall design, make a stack of blocks for each row, stacked in the order you want to sew them. I have to move my entire project back and forth between rooms a lot, so I even like to label my stacks.
Okay, just sewing these quilt puffs is going to take you at least a week. Get going on that, and I’ll see you next week to talk about how to actually turn these stacks of pockets into a proper quilt!
