My Giant Picnic Quilt

I have been so excited about this project! It was so much fun, I think I have found a new passion! Brent kept telling me that I should make a picnic blanket and I had been thinking about it myself. So I searched the internet to find a pattern and found the perfect, perfect inspiration in my opinion. Red and white, the colors of picnics to me. Trying to figure out the measurements was another story. I thought a queen quilt was something like 102" x 115" turns out that's what a king is! I didn't want it the size of a king, I thought that would be way too big. In the end my giant quilt turned out to be 110" x 116". Whoops!

So I am going to try and walk you through how it all came together, I apologize for any confusion, but I will try.

My ruler is only 6 inches wide, so that was the easiest size to make my squares. 6" x 6". I chose 8 different materials because that is the number of triangles in the block I chose to do. That's 45 squares of each material or 360 total.

After I cut all of my squares I decided to build a tower out of them . . .

Anyway. . .

The next step is to cut the squares in half so we have a ton of triangles. 90 of each color to be exact, that's 720 triangles total. 

Again with the towers, I know. . .

The next step is to figure out the placement of each piece of material.

I came up with 9 completely different blocks and tried to arrange them so that none of the same material was touching when I put the blocks together.

Then I sewed my blocks into rows . . .

And sewed my rows into a quilt top. I then added a 4 inch red border around the edge and sewed it all together. I bought some material and padding for the back, had it quilted(at American Quilting) and sewed on my binding. I know that isn't very helpful but I didn't take pictures of how to do the binding so I will save how to do that for another day.

I usually hand bind my quilts but with this being so big and because it is just going to be outside in the dirt I decided to machine bind it. I wont be showing you any close ups on the binding because it looks horrendous. Sewing with a walking foot is much harder than I thought. But anyway, my finished product . . .

I am just afraid now I wont want anyone on it with their dirty shoes!