Sewing a puff quilt is for sure a labor of love, but it’s worth it!
Puff quilts are very on-trend right now, and I know this because my very on-trend teenager asked me for one.
A puff quilt isn’t a technically challenging quilt to sew, requiring only square cuts and straight seams, but it’s fiddly enough that it’s best left to sewists who are pretty confident in their skills. You CAN iron every crease and pin every seam, but that will turn this quilt from a 1,000-hour project into a 10,000-hour project!
This puff quilt is a champion at stashbusting, since so much of the stiches and fabric won’t be seen. I was able to use up every square inch of my most hated quilting cotton and every last centimeter of my weirdest thread colors, and that alone makes the project worth it to me! Other benefits of the puff quilt include its warmth and weight, the absence of a layer of batting, and the pixel design that means that you can make your quilt look however you want.
Here’s how to make one!
Materials
To sew a puff quilt, you will need:
- fabric for the front of the quilt. Quilting cotton works best for this project. If you experiment, though, just choose fabrics with absolutely no stretch. Each front piece will be 4.5″ square, so this is a great time to dig through your scraps bin.
- fabric for the inside of the quilt. These 4″ square blocks will be sewn to the 4.5″ blocks to make the puff pockets, and will be sandwiched invisibly inside the quilt. This means that you can use all your most garbage stash fabrics, all the stuff you actually hate but can’t stand to get rid of. I used up all the rest of the pink and purple prints that my 9-year-old once loved but my 19-year-old now thinks are stupid (sob!), some super ugly prints that I was given long ago from someone else’s sewing room clean-out, and every single scrap that was at least 4″ square. It was BLISS!!! You can also cheat here by using some thinner fabrics like muslin or old pillowcase lining, etc., but again, these fabrics should have ZERO stretch.
- 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 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 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.
Pick Your Design
Before you can sew your beautiful puff quilt, you have to decide what it’s going to look like!
First: size. Each puff quilt block in my quilt ends up 4″ square, and even though I consider myself pretty mathy, for some reason I decided that the perfect size quilt for a teenager was 22 squares by 28 squares, or 88″x112″. I have NO idea why I made it this big, especially because all it did was make extra work for me, but at least I had lots of pixels to make a cute design!
You can color in your design digitally or by hand, or you can make it easy on yourself and decide that all your squares will be random. Whatever you decide, it’ll look great!
Cut Your Pieces
After picking the size of your quilt, divide each dimension by 4 to see how many squares make up that measurement. For my quilt, an 88″ width means 22 squares, and a 112″ length means 28 squares. I multiplied 22×28 to see that for my whole quilt I’d need 616 squares, which is a number that honestly should have stopped me in my tracks and convinced me to downsize, but hindsight is 20/20, lol!
Whatever your total number is, you will need that in 1) 4″ squares that nobody will see, since they’ll be sandwiched in the middle of your quilt, and 2) 4.5″ squares that will make up the front of your quilt. That should ALSO have convinced me to downsize my quilt, but oh, well!
If you designed a specific pixel quilt front, you also need to count out how many 4.5″ squares you need of your specific colors. For my quilt design, I wanted to keep my black background black, so I needed 330 black 4.5″ squares, and 286 4.5″ squares of any other colors or prints.
Okay, it’s going to take you at LEAST a week to design your quilt and cut out all those squares, so we’ll pick this up again next week with sewing your puff pockets!
