Flannel Rag Quilt

At our Quilt day on Wednesday, the teens cut a HUGE stack of flannel scraps into these 8 1/2 inch rag squares.  We used the new die that cuts the fringed edges.  When I used the die on the t shirts, the edged rolled on me and I had a hard time getting the pieces together without the edges rolling and catching in the foot of the machine.

One of the ladies started this project at the beginning of quilt day.  She worked for 5 hours on the project and so I thought she was having just as hard of a time working with the flannel squares as I was having with the t shirt pieces.  I was a bit disappointed that here we were cutting out all of these pieces and now it was going to take 473 hours to sew a quilt together.  The whole point in getting the die was so we could use up all the donated flannel quickly, not take hours and hours to get it all used up.

When I talked to Carla about it at the end of the day, she said, well, that's just how that lady works.  She's a perfectionist.  She would pin the blocks together and very carefully sew each one.  At the end of the 5 hours, she had two rows of blocks sewn.

I decided this morning to finish up the quilt she had started.

I'm a random kind of person and so just grabbed pieces and started sewing.  I wanted the quilt to be double sided so one row of fringe is on the front and the other is on the back.  Actually I messed up and then decided I liked it this way.  I didn't really want the three purple blocks together, but I'm ok with them being together, it all goes with the randomness of the quilt.

It took me about 45 minutes to put the rest of the quilt together.  I think you can make a whole quilt in under an hour, including cutting the blocks.  I'm very happy with how the flannel works with the fringe already cut.  There's no rolling or movement of the fringe when you sew, even close to the fringe.  The next quilt I will try to lay out the blocks before sewing.  There are lots of scraps, but some of the flannel goes together.  Maybe not enough for a whole quilt, but Carla gave me a whole bunch of solids, so I can cut that and work it in with the random pieces.

The quilt is warm and super soft.  It's in the washing machine now and will fluff up even more when it comes out of the dryer.  That's the worst part about these blankets...the lint that comes off the first washing!

When my daughter and I made one a long time ago, the cutting of the fringe by hand was so terrible.  It took a couple weeks and we both had really sore hands.  I love that the fringe is all cut out for you. I can tell we will have a lot of these quilts in the near future!

If you have an Accuquilt Go! or Studio fabric cutter, you need to add this die to your list of blocks to get.  It is really a great die to own.