Fun with Bricks!

  
  This "Brick Paths" quilt was made for the Hurricane Katrina Relief effort.
Block size: 12''.

Click HERE for Printer-Friendly PDF.

If you have poked around this website a bit, you will notice that I have a passion for scrappy quilts! I sort scraps into strips, bricks and squares for the most part. It seems the sizes of strips that I tend to use most are strips in 2" and 2.5" widths. 2" was by far the most overflowing, so I chose projects that would help me tame them a bit, but still have a quilt that was fun and easy to make. I started digging through the bin of 2" strips looking for darks and mediums. Anything that was contrasting enough against the cream background fabric I had chosen.

Here is my creative sewing mess! I just started pairing these strips together, not really caring what next to what, other than I was not sewing two of the same colors together. I must have sewn about a mile of strips through this machine, look at the pile at the back! Don't you love chain piecing?

Take the long chain of paired strips to your ironing board and press them open to one side. It really didn't matter which side, since the fabrics are all medium/dark. Subcut these strips into 3.5" squares.

The first unit you will make is the pinwheel layout above. You will need 60 of these little guys, and it is important that your block be laid out just like this, or the blocks won't go together in the next step, the strips would turn around the wrong way and you won't get the braided look of the bricks going down the diagonal of the quilt. Ask me how I know! I had to pick out a whole bunch of these!

Next is the alternate block! You will also need 60 of these units. They are made with two of the brick sub-cut squares, and two 3.5" light squares sewn into a 4 patch unit. It is also VERY important that you have the brick blocks and the plain blocks in THIS exact order for them to fit with the brick pinwheel blocks above!

This is your main block! It finishes at 12" square. There are 30 blocks in the quilt. Again, THESE blocks made from the brick pinwheel units and the alternate brick 4 patch blocks have to all be sewn in this order for them to fit next to each other right and complete the chain! (Yes, I had to unpick some of these too! *LOL*)

When I first had the blocks together, I found that I could play with alternate layouts too! Because it is an asymmetrical block, you can lay it out in any log cabin setting! Here is a "Barn Raising".

I decided that I liked the "straight furrows" with the diagonal chains best! Sew the blocks into rows, and then sew the rows together to complete the quilt center. I think this quilt would also look great in brights, with black squares for the diagonal chains instead of cream. I added a 2" cut inner red border, and a 5" cut outer blue border and simply meandered the quilt so I could send it off quickly to the hurricane relief place.

Want a different look? Change the alternate block and get this:

This was actually the first quilt I made with the bricks. I had in my mind what to do with the alternate blocks, but it didn't make the plain path down the quilt as I thought it would! Still, I liked it, and it reminds me of "Brick Bowties".

For the alternate blocks you need 3.5" squares, 3.5"X6.5" bricks as well as the brick unit squares. I used a variety of scrappy lights in this quilt. The second picture shows the second step of assembly....after the 3.5" squares are sewn to the brick units, stitch a 3.5"X6.5" brick to the side of the unit, log cabin style.

This pic is a bit blurry because I enlarged it from the quilt! Each brick bowtie block is made with the same brick pinwheels unit as in the first quilt, and you can see the other alternate block units sewn with them here to make the brick bowties block! 

This is also a 12" block and can be set into a variety of log cabin settings! My brick bowties is a lap size quilt, made with 20 blocks set 4X5. I added a 2" cut inner border and a 5" cut outer border to finish it off!

 
 This is a detail shot of the 'feathers all over' design I quilted it with!

©2005 Bonnie K Hunter. All Rights Reserved.