My First Rag Quilt

I know these have been around FOREVER but I've never had much of a flannel stash. The first flannel quilt I ever made was a pieced project and the flannel was so squirrelly I didn't want to attempt another.

However, I have some flannel that I bought for something else and wanted to use it up. So I decided that making a couple rag quilts would be a good way to do that.

I decided on 6 1/2" squares. I'm planning to do 10 blocks x 10 blocks so that's 100 squares just for the top, 200 including the back and 100 more of batting. Yikes! That's a lot of squares and I am planning to do 2 with more or less the same fabrics so double that. The squares will be the same but I'll use different fabrics for the backings.

Thank goodness for my QuiltCut2 Fabric Cutting System!

I cut all of the fabric squares (400) in 3 hours. I used some scraps of batting and then full size pieces which I folded in half and then in half again. I cut 100 of these squares in less than an hour. Then I ran out of batting.

Here are the fabric squares for both quilts.

These are the squares for the first quilt. The Monkey Fabric is going to be the backing.

I decided to do a little quilting in each square before I put it together. I chose a variegated thread that will go with all of the fabrics in the quilt for the top and a bright pink for the back which goes perfectly with the little monkey print.

I quilted a simple X through all of the Monkey squares. That's as far as I've gotten so far. Stay tuned to watch the progress of this project.

Happy Quilting,

Carol