Hi I’m Jenny from the Missouri Star Quilt Company. Take a look at this beautiful quilt
behind me. This is one of those plus quilts and plus quilts are all the rage right now.
See how these go together to make these plus signs? They are so popular and everyone loves
them. And I want to show you a super easy way to do this using just charm squares. So
the charm square we are using today are called “Indian Summer,” and they’re by Dover
Hill for Benartex and they’re just beautiful. I just love those shades of blues and greens,
they’re just gorgeous. This quilt is about 58 by 68 and we have used four charm packs
in the making of this quilt. But what you really need to pay attention to is that each
plus takes five squares. So you need to be sure and check your charm packs to see if
you have extras or you know if they have put doubles in there or triples or if they’re
just singles, because you need five squares of each color to make this plus quilt.
So this whole quilt is all about the layout. It’s as easy as a charm pack quilt. So what
we’re going to do, I’m going to show you how to lay this out. We’re going to open
up these, this charm pack. This is an Indian, this “Indian Summer” charm pack. And you
will notice right off the bat that I have several of each color in here and that makes
this a real easy quilt. And so I’m going to open up this second one. And I’m just
going to, what I’ll kind of do is just stack them together so I know exactly what I have.
So what I’ve done here is I’ve taken two of the charm packs and I’ve open them up
and the fun thing about this “Indian Summer” is there are several pieces of the same fabric
in these charm packs so you can build your little stacks easier. I’ve stacked them
all out here, lined them up in order of color, because this helps me when I am putting them
together. So for those of you who love games like tetris,
you are going to love this quilt cause it is going to make so much sense in your mind
and it’s going to go together like clockwork. For those of you who are a little angley challenged
like this girl here. You’re going to need to really watch the layout and really make
sure you have, you know all your things lined out. What I do to help me is I make the pluses
and then I fit them together how they go. So let’s start here with this one. And I
going to make my plus by putting one above a row of three like this and one below. That
makes my plus right there. So then I’m going to make another plus right here and I’m
going to put that up here. I going to make three in a row and I’m going to slide that
up here, right into this spot right here. And then I’ll put one above and one below.
Now if this row ends up being my top row I will end up discarding that one. But for just
for now for the sake of being able to see it and how the layout works and how it goes
together. I’m just going to leave that one there.
So then over here, you know I’ve got one here, one here, now I’m going to lay one
out right here. And I’m going to put this here and I’m going to have a couple here
like this, but if this is the edge of my quilt I have to stop right there and I’m just
going to make a half a plus. So then my next plus right here, let me scoot these out of
the way a little bit. My next plus right here is going to squeeze up into here and I’ll
have three of these and three across, and one at the top and one at the bottom and it
makes your plus. So as you go along you’ll want to have a nice big floor to lay this
out and you’ll want to be able to see how all your pluses go together. You’ll want
to watch this very carefully make sure that you have, you know that they’re in the in
the right places. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to sew this together
row by row like this.
So what I do then if this is the top of my quilt is I’m just going to sew this row
together. And it’s just like sewing a charm pack quilt. You’re going to take your two
blocks, you’re going to put them right sides together, you’re going to sew a ¼ of an
inch, you’re going to press to the dark side. And then you’re going to just lay
them out and sew a whole row. Then you’ll attach the next row and so on and so on and
it’s just going to be so fun and you’ll have a plus quilt just like this. Now I want
to show you one more cool thing about this quilt. We had some leftover squares some leftover
charms. So what we did was we took a piece of the border. But up here in this top corner
you can see that we put in some squares and we did that on this top corner and we did
it on the bottom corner down here too. Just to offset it and give it a little more pizazz.
Also you guys know I don’t like waste. So that enables us to just go ahead and you know
use up those extra squares on the outside of the border.
So I hope that you guys have fun making this, because this is a really fun idea. The plus
quilt is so popular and they’re just fun to put together and just be careful with that
layout. Watch what you’re doing. So we hope you enjoyed this tutorial on how to make the
plus quilt from the Missouri Star Quilt Company.