I’ve had fun with some fabric strips today I made the strip sets last week and finished sewing them up this afternoon.

I used 40 Moda Jelly Roll strips to make this patchwork top so I thought I’d take plenty of photos and write a tutorial in case anyone else wanted to make one. I’ve seen pictures of this design many times before on the internet in lots of different colours and fabric designs. You could make the diamonds smaller or larger by using a different number of strips.

Anyway, here goes:

Start with 40 two and a half inch strips across the width of the fabric. You will need to have at least 42.5 inches across, not including selvedges. My Moda strips were just right. I decided on 8 each of 5 different colours.

Lay the strips along the ironing board and spray the creases with a little bit of water. Press until dry. Don’t wriggle the iron or the strips may become distorted.

Sew together one dark and one light. Press the seam towards the dark fabric by keeping the dark strip on top and lifting it.

Return this double strip to the original group of 4 strips. Repeat until you have 10 sets of 2 double strips. Now, sew the double strips together in each group, light to dark.

You should end up with 10 strips of four going light, dark, light, dark. All seams should be pressed towards the darker fabric. Remember, lay the dark one on top and lift then press. My 10 strip sets looked like this lying on top of each other.

Now, take one of the strip sets and cut the selvedge off.

My sets are eight and a half inches tall (which is what you should end up with as they all started out at 2.5 inches wide) so I cut off five squares of 8.5 inches wide.

Repeat this with all strip sets. you should have 50 squares altogether. There are very few scraps! You willl need 48 squares for the quilt top. I’m going to use the 2 spare ones for a pillow.

Take two squares from different strip sets and place right sides together, light on top of dark and dark on top of light.

Draw the diagonal on the top square. When repeating this on other squares, be consistent in the direction of the diagonal. For example, if you are left handed you might choose to draw from bottom left to top right.

Sew a quarter of an inch either side of the drawn line, making sure that you “nest” the seams.  Then cut along the line.

Open and press the squares.

Repeat with the other 23 pairs of squares. Then arrange them however you wish. There are several possible arrangements. I opted to have twelve blocks of four squares with two small squares diagonally opposite each other in the middle of each block of four. This is my layout. Take care to press the seams clockwise or anti-clockwise consistently in each block so the centres are not too bulky. If you snip a couple of stitches from the centres, they will press like a pinwheel on the back. There are more details about this in my pinwheels tutorial.

I swapped a few around as I sewed them together. Here is the finished patchwork top. The two spare squares are going to be used for a pillow.

I hope you like this geometric style. Now, I just need to decide how to quilt it

If you do decide to make one of these, please send me a photo and I’ll add it to the tutorial.

Happy Sunday!