Spring Wreath Quilt Along: Week 1

It’s finally time to get started on our Spring Wreath Quilt Along! We are so excited to make this quilt with you. It’s the perfect time of year for a breath of fresh air in quilt form. By now, you should have picked all of your fabrics and have them ready to go. Before we get started cutting, we always label our fabrics according to the pattern.

Check out our process in this video:

We use little paper scraps to label the fabric. Sometimes, we will use clips to keep the fabric and paper together. Since all of the pieces in this quilt are the same cuts, we made a little display of the fabric on our cork tiles that you can see in the last part of the video above.

Once you have decided which fabric to use for which number, you can begin cutting squares. We like to layer fabric to make this part go faster, but we usually won’t do more than four layers at a time. If you get too many fabrics stacked up, you’re more likely to have the fabric shift as you cut. It’s also a great time to think about if you need to replace your rotary cutter blade. We put a new blade in right before this project and couldn’t believe the difference it made!

Our big tip for cutting a lot of the same size of square is to mark just outside the lines with some washi tape on the top of your ruler. This will make it easy for you to see if you’re cutting the right size of square each time and is especially helpful when you don’t have any extra fabric to waste. (The size marked on this ruler is for illustrative purposes and is not the size of squares you’ll be cutting for this quilt. Refer to the Piece & Love book for the correct cut sizes.)

NOTE: If you’d like to follow the exact layout of the colors in the book, you will need to cut an additional square for Fabric 7, OR you can substitute one leftover piece from Fabric 2, 6, 9, 13, or 14. (We will be using 14.)

Once your wreath squares are all cut, you’ll then cut diagonally to make the triangles. Here’s a video showing how we use our rotating cutting mat for this step:

It really speeds up the process to use a rotating mat, since you don’t have to reposition the squares each time you want to make a new cut. Look at all these pretty triangles ready to go!

Next, you’ll cut your background fabric pieces. We’re using a print from the Brushed basic line by Ruby Star Society in the Snow color. It’s one of our favorite low volume prints even though it’s a two-directional print.

Here’s a fun timelapse of us cutting all of the background fabric:

After you have the background fabric cut, you’re all done for this week! You can share your progress in a couple of different ways:

On Instagram, use the #springwreathqal and #theclothparcel hashtags. You can also tag us @theclothparcel. Note that if you have a private Instagram account, we won’t be able to see any of your posts.
In our private Facebook group, you can share photos in a post or in the comments of any of our posts. You can also ask for help or advice there!
On this post, you can leave a comment telling us about how things are going for you.