Farm Livin’ Panel Quilt

Hi Makers – if you have read some of my previous blogs, you’ll know I love chopping up panels! You can see what I did with some of the Christmas and Halloween panels in previous posts.

This time I’m cutting up the Farm Livin’ panel to make a crib sized quilt. The collection has charming vibrant prints, and the animals in the panel make for a really great eye-spy quilt. Read on to find out more about my approach.

Fussy cutting the panel motives

In order to make the most of the panel, you need to do a little bit of planning! I decided to use squares which were multiples of 3 inches, plus the seam allowance. This meant that I cut up 3.5 inch squares, 6.5 inch squares, and one 12.5 inch square that featured the large red barn in the panel. Additionally, I fussy cut rectangles, also in 3 inch multiples. For example, I cut the windmill in a 6.5 x 12.5 inch rectangle.

When fussy cutting details in a print, the Riley Blake Lori Holt Cute Cuts rulers are very handy! They help you centre the motif and add the seam allowance, avoiding mistakes when cutting up your panel. Beyond the fussy cutting rulers, I also used a big ruler for the bigger cuts.

You can see in the photos that I marked the fabric using a heat-erasable pen. This helped me to plan how to use the panel. It also meant that I could iron any marks if I wanted to change a particular fussy cutting square.

Mixing in prints from the fabric collection

The Farm Livin’ collection offers a nice range of blenders and fun prints which provide a nice contrast in scale to the animals in the panel. I also used some of the Riley Blake basics that coordinate with the colours in this collection, like Honey Dainty Daisy and the Green Grasscloth Cottons.

Finishing the quilt

I pieced the back with some basics and feature prints of the collection in the red colour way, which I thought would be striking. I tend to use darker colours for the backs of crib-sized quilts, as I know they often double up as playmats on the floor! I decided to use scraps from the panel and the collection for binding, which also made for a fun scrappy binding, blending with the quilt.