The Clothesline Quilts are finally finished! I'd been trying to wait for a nice day to take the photos but, this being Oregon, it's been overcast for about the last week!
I really, really lucked out with the pillowcases I found to make this one. The colors are fantasic and many of the case were "new" in their packages, so the fabric was very crisp.
The sashing is white Essex cotton/linen (of course!).
It was difficult to cut these up, but I love the finished product!
And here's the Super-Soc version! I ended up taking your advice and not removing the quilting. I'm still not in love with it, but the finished quilt is nice.
Someone asked in the comments whether I did anything special to get the plaid to line up. I didn't. In fact, I didn't make any effort to keep the plaids straight, because I think that, with this kind of casual summer look, having the plaids be slightly wonky looks better.
I mention in the pattern that it's best to concentrate on creating squared-up blocks of identical size, but that there's no need to worry about the piecing within the blocks being perfect. (Hopefully that makes sense!)
I'm not sure that the back of the Soc quilt is particularly effective, but boy is it ever soft! The combination of the madras plaids and natural linen is perfect for summer. I think it would also be pretty cool to make one from flannel shirts for winter.
The repeating nine-patch pattern is designed around using nine pillowcases, nine old shirts, or nine 3/4 yard cuts of fabric. Because of the nine-patch within a nine-patch layout and the limited fabric available from pillowcases and shirts, this is basically a "one-size" pattern. It makes a nice little 55" x 62" lap quilt. (Don't let that stop your from figuring out how to make a larger quilt work! I'm just saying that the pattern here is only focused on the one size.)
I've seen some people commenting that they wanted to use their vintage sheet fat quarters to make this pattern. You can certainly use nine fat quarters to cut sets of 2" x 21" strips and make the 81 small blocks for the quilt front. However, you will have no fabric left over for the binding or backing. Additionally, the pieces used for the quilt back are larger than fat quarters, so you'll need to either find a larger piece (maybe a vintage sheet) or you could use a narrow sashing between nine fat quarters to make a large enough back. Binding strips can similarly be cut from additional fat quarters or from a vintage sheet.
Here are the pattern downloads:
Download Clothesline Quilts Organizer Cards
If you need them, I also have tutorials for sandwiching, quilting and binding.
As always, if you end up making one, I would love to see it in the Flickr Pool.
Stay gold, readers!
