By Kathryn

I started working on the quilt for my sister and her husband again today!

Long story short, I had wanted to complete the quilt before my sister’s bridal shower in early January, but life had other plans. I worked consistently on the piecing for much of November and December, and then the things I was helping with for wedding planning took over my project time in January and leading up to the wedding in February.

Now, a couple months after the wedding, I am finally back to finishing the piecing on this quilt. I hope to finish the quilt top, long-arm machine quilt it, and get the binding on by the end of May.

I used the Have a Heart quilt top pattern (affiliate link) as the inspiration for this quilt. I’ve made three quilts using this pattern as wedding gifts in the past and I love how each one turned out.

Since I am making a queen sized quilt, I decided to write a pattern with multiple hearts – but still using the jelly roll concept – instead of just adding boarders to the Have a Heart pattern to make it larger.

Here’s a sketch of about two thirds of the quilt. I only sketched out this much of the quilt because the pattern starts repeating after row 21 or so.

After drawing the pattern out to scale on the dotted graph paper I also wrote out a “cut list” of how long each piece of fabric needed to be in each row. All the pieces are 2.5 inches high.

Cutting the fabric has been the most time consuming because each heart is made up of a different combination of neutral fabrics. I like the way this looks as I finish the rows, but it does mean I need to keep track of which fabrics go with which hearts.

About halfway through the piecing, I started cutting all the fabric strips for each heart at one time (something I can do when my youngest is awake in the mornings) and stacking the pieces from top row to bottom row of the heart.

Then I use sewing clips (affiliate link) to keep all the pieces together with a note of which heart it is in the row.

Pre-cutting the fabric for the hearts has helped the process go much more quickly. As I go along I cut the background fabric and sew one row at a time so I don’t lose my place in the pattern.

This morning I pieced together three more rows and sewed them to the quilt top. I now have 13 rows left! After all the rows are completed I plan to add one or two boarders to the quilt top before long-arm machine quilting it.

My plan right now is to add a 2-inch boarder of material left from the hearts, and then a 4-inch board of the background fabric. Then I will bind it in fabric that matches the hearts. However, if that will make the quilt too big, I will skip the 4-inch boarder and bind the quilt with the background fabric.

Tomorrow I plan to sew one or two more rows during afternoon rest time, and I might possibly sew another one or two rows after we put the kids to bed in the evening. I would love the get the number of rows remaining under 10 by the end of the weekend if I can!

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