The rag quilts that I've seen are a far cry from that although there are a few made of left over fabric scraps. They all look great and seem to be fairly easy to make so I thought I would turn my hand to making one.
I'd like to say that I had a theme in mind before I started but it was a trip to Spotlight and 50% off clearance fabrics and flannelette that really shaped my quilt. There was some cheap nautical themed cotton and blue flannel with swallows (my name in chinese means swallow) and the seeds of a red, white and blue themed quilt was planted.
I'm a planner by nature, so I was never really going to launch headlong into cutting up fabric and sewing it together. First I had to figure out the dimensions that I wanted for the quilt and work whether I had enough material to make it out of. I ended up finding a pdf with instructions on how to calculate your fabric requirements http://www.fabricsnquilts.com/uploads/Rag_Quilt_Calculator.pdf and adapted that into an spreadsheet.
Then I had to figure out how best to put these fabrics together - even at the best of times I'm not really great with matching things up and as a result, if not kept really simple my projects tend to come out looking like a 4 year old has made them (no offence to any 4 year olds out there). Cue my spreadsheet which I used as a very basic design board by formatting cells to represent different designs.
In the end I ended up going with my son's initials on one side and a ship on the other. Cue my spreadsheet again which I used to calculate how much of each fabric I needed to make my design.
I managed to source the additional fabric from my existing stash so in the end have spent $18 on this quilt - $8 for 8m of fabric from Spotlight (thanks to a $10 voucher for registering my VIP card online) and $10 for the op shop doona.
Stay tuned for the next instalment - Putting the quilt together (eek!)
