Patch work quilts are timeless, are they not? Patch work quilts have been manufactured for hundreds of years, because in essence a patch work quilt is made from off-cuts of cloth. A housewife would make a set of curtains and store the off-cuts. Then she would make some clothes and store the off-cuts. And so on and so on until she had enough off-cuts to make a quilt, if she required one for her household.

This old-style of constructing bedspreads or quilts always manages to look traditional and contemporary at the same time. A specialist variety of this old-style is the American tradition of women embroidering off-cuts of fabric in order to create a quilt as an excuse for a social life. Nowadays there is more money floating about in society and the patches on the quilt can be more personal and more elaborate.

There is also a great deal more choice of cloth about than there ever was, so it is not always necessary to embellish a swatch of cloth to make it one’s own. Someone might always use blue and white stripes as a signature or green and black squares for example. Most individuals create a patch work quilt of identical squares, but others will use squares with curved corners and even rectangles, rhombuses, circles and triangles.

Some patch work quilters like to select a theme whilst others are happy to let numerous participants sew in any patch that they like. There are also patch block patterns. The four patch scheme is almost certainly the most common, but the nine patch scheme is also fairly common.

A four patch scheme is achieved by dividing the quilt into equal squares and then bisecting each square across the top and down the sides. Every block of four squares can then have a theme. The same goes for a nine patch scheme, but divide every large block on the quilt with two vertical and two horizontal lines constructing nine small squares in every large square.

You can design your quilt pattern on graph paper if you like. To do this, first work out how large you would like your quilt to be. Then draw that on graph paper and divide your graph into the number of that you want. Novices may be better off using larger squares in the beginning and then boosting the number of squares by decreasing their size.

Begin with a four block scheme and move up to a nine and then twelve block scheme. You can repeat the swatches of cloth at regular or irregular intervals and you can change the orientation of the swatch in your patch work quilt too. A patch work quilt can be well planned or completely random. Well planned quilts can be fairly dazzling, but even random quilts look fantastic.

Owen Jones, the author of that piece, writes on a variety of topics, but is now concerned with the chenille throw blankets. If you want to know more, please visit our website at Woollen Blankets.