Warm Wishes For A Football Fan

My husband asked for a quilt for watching football this season. I decided to go with the Warm Wishes pattern. You can find the link to download this free pattern here:Warm Wishes

This is a very simple and very adaptable pattern. It is made up of only two blocks: a rail fence (block made with strips) and a plain block of your focus fabric. I say it is adaptable because you can make the blocks any size, so if you have a focus fabric with a large pattern, you can use it without cutting it up too much.

To begin, decide what size you want for the blocks. You will make the rail fence blocks first. They are made of three strips. I made mine with two 2.5" gold strips and one 3.5" burgundy strip.

You can use three different colors if you like. Make the strip sets all the same (the colors in the same order), so that when you put them together, you get the interesting "frame" effect. You can also vary the widths if you want to emphasize particular fabrics.



Making the strip sets is easy; simply sew the strips of fabric together on the long side to create a pieced strip of fabric. Press your strip set and measure the width. Mine was 7.5", so I sub-cut the strip sets at that same measurement to create square blocks. Your sub-cuts will depend upon the width of your strip set--if you have used wider strips, your set might be 9" wide--in this case, you would sub-cut your strip set into 9" pieces. The key is that you want square blocks after cutting.



Using this same measurement, you can now cut your focus fabric into squares that will be the same size as the rail fence (three strip) blocks. I cut mine at 7.5".



Putting the blocks together is easy. Each horizontal row will alternate a focus fabric square and a rail fence square. As you look at the photo below, notice that the rail fence blocks change orientation with each horizontal row. In this example, Row 1 has horizontal rail fence blocks; row 2 has vertical ones. This creates a "frame" around some of the focus fabric blocks.

I used more of the team fabric for the backing, and I used a black binding to set off the colors.

Ready for kickoff!