Baby’s First Chevron: When Creativity Is the Only Solution

One of my favorite times of the month is receiving the instructions for the Brooklyn Quilters Guild block of the month in our newsletter. Like many guilds, our members all come into the monthly meeting with a completed block and then put their names into a raffle. The winner takes home all of the blocks, out of which they can presumably make a quilt. Last October’s block was the Chevron.

Unfortunately, the meeting that month coincided with a big quilting retreat that many of the guild members attended, which meant there were a total of five Chevron Blocks submitted for the raffle. And I was the big winner of five 5.5″ square blocks. Yay?

For those of you reading this who might not be aware, you can’t really make a quilt out of five 5.5″ square blocks. You could make a pillow maybe. You could make five separate mug rugs (a.k.a. quilted coasters). But even a baby quilt needs more square footage than what these little blocks could provide. What to do? What to do?

My first attempt at a solution was to send out an eblast to the guild begging everyone, especially the members who missed out on the October meeting, to bring in more Chevron Blocks to the November meeting. Many members stepped up to the challenge. Yay!

I also made a call out for more blocks at the actual November meeting, hoping to play on everyone’s sympathies. Then I made the discovery that the scraps from the December block of the month could be made into two smaller Chevron blocks! So I sent out yet another eblast asking people to either give me their scraps or go ahead and create the smaller chevrons and pass them on to me at the December meeting.

The resulting total of Chevron blocks went from five to 45! Not bad! Now I had something to work with. I probably could have made a few more blocks myself and put them all together into a traditional Chevron baby quilt, but I decided I wanted to do something a little more modern and also bigger. It was time to pull out the ol’ design wall.

Because I live in a small one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, NY, the only wall wide enough for a true design wall is my hallway. I use a very large piece of cotton batting in which I’ve hammered grommets, and I hang it from nails along the top of the wall. It ain’t pretty, but it does the job and I can lay out queen-sized quilts before piecing them together to make sure everything looks the way I want it to look.

I laid out the chevrons on my design wall and started rearranging them over and over until I found an overall design I was happy with. This quilt was going to have a lot of negative space, so I needed to work in chunks as I figured out how much background fabric I needed for each section. It came together pretty quickly, and I started getting excited about how I was going to quilt all of that negative space.

In keeping with the modern aesthetic, I decided to do simple, straight-line quilting, and I was able to create some fun overall designs by extending the lines of the chevrons and weaving them in and out of each other.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the super-cool flannel backing! My friend Shannon and I went to a couple quilt shops in Lancaster, PA, last spring, and we made an amazing discovery at Zook’s Fabric Store. I don’t know if the incredibly low prices were because of the quilt shows going on in the area or if it’s just the norm, but their fabrics were crazy cheap! I was so excited to pick up several yards of this black-and-white chevron flannel to use as the backing for this baby quilt.

To finish it all off, I went with a very simple white binding because I wanted the chevrons to just float on the quilt without a concrete frame around them. I am very pleased with the result. I think this turned out to be a really modern-looking baby quilt for a family that is not so into the more traditional decor styles. To think, this all started with five little blocks!

Have you ever had to find creative solutions to what seemed like a problem at first and then turned out beautifully? I’d love to hear your stories, so please share in the comments section below! Happy crafting!!