Making a whole quilt from your favourite Red Sky at Night block!

The Red Sky at Night Quilt pattern has 49 machine pieced block designs that can be sewn into a 7x7 layout quilt. I decided to take a favourite, the Churn Dash block and make 49 of them, sewn together in the same way as the sampler, and following the original instructions for the sashing. 

The first thing I did was taken note of the shapes or units required for the Churn Dash. You can see from the Red Sky pattern excerpt below that for one block, I need (4) HSTs, (4) light and dark rectangle units, and (1) square. So to make 49 of these blocks, I would need: 

• 196 half square triangles
• 196 light and dark rectangles
• 49 squares for the centre.

I then referred to the instructions on page 19 of the pattern for making HSTs and noted that 1 light 4" square and 1 dark 4" square make two 3 1/2" half square triangle units. That meant that I needed to divide the total number of HSTs required (196) by 2 to know how many 4" squares in each colour I needed to cut. I needed (98) 4" squares in light and dark. 

I decided to use on of my Scrappy Rainbow Bundles from the shop, which has 80 pieces in it. To get an even spread, I cut one 4" square, and two rectangles from each print, and then I went back through and chose my favourites. I cut an extra 4" square from 18 of them, and an extra rectangle from 36 of them. 

I had large pieces of this Starry wideback leftover from basting quilts, so decided to use that for the background. Because they weren't regular width of fabric pieces, I didn't use any maths to work out cutting quickly or fabric requirements, but if I had wanted to buy background fabric specifically for this project, I would have used the following process: 

1. Work out how many squares (or rectangles) fit along the width of fabric. I always use 42" as a standard width to allow for differences in selevdge. I can fit (10) 4" squares along a width of fabric. 
2. Then, work out how many strips you'll need to cut, with (10) in each strip. I need 98 squares, so I divide 98 by 10 and get 9.8. Round that number UP to the nearest whole number. I need (10) 4" strips of fabric. 
3. Then, work out how much fabric that is all up by multiplying the number of strips by the size of the strip. 10 strips x 4" = 40". 
4. Write that number down, and then move onto the next shape - in this case, the rectangles and the centre squares - to calculate the total yardage required. 

For this quilt, I would have needed 74" for the main print if I'd used a single colour. Divide it by 36" to get the yardage, and I have 2.05 yards. I would round that up to 2 1/4 yards or 2 metres. For the background, I needed 91.5" or a little over 2 1/2 yards. 

Now for the fun part! Because I was making my Churn Dash scrappy, I didn't need to cut and make one colour blocks at a time. I sewed my rectangles together in one long chain, then I marked all my squares along the diagonal and did the same. I cut, pressed, trimmed, all in batches, and then I started sewing my blocks together. 

I sat for a bit before I started sewing to see if there was an easy way to batch this step too. I love being able to chain piece without thinking and wondered if I could achieve it with the 9-patch block. I didn't want to just sew HSTs to rectangle units and end up with too many of these pairs and no rows of three. I also hate the feeling when you're making a scrap quilt into blocks that you might use up all your favourites, and be left at the end with 3 of the same brown in the last block. I came up with this fun and clever method:

1. First, I sewed all of my centre squares to a rectangle unit. You'll know to stop when your centre squares run out.
2. Then I sewed a rectangle unit to the other side of each centre square. Now I had 49 of the centre third of the Churn Dash block. 
3. I sewed an HST to every leftover rectangle, with the dark triangle facing the centre, and the dark rectangle on the bottom.
4. Then I sewed the last HSTs to the other side of the rectangle. Now I had 49 centre units, and 98 outside units. 
5. I sewed an outside unit to a centre until all the centres had run out. 
6. Finally, I sewed the last outside units to the block.

Sewing the blocks this way meant that I didn't need to any counting as I sewed - the units running out did that for me, and I got an even spread of colour across my quilt!

This hack isn't going to work with all blocks in the Red Sky at Night Quilt, but I definitely recommend spending a little time with your units to see if there might be an easy way to batch and chain piece your blocks. It saves a whole lot of getting up and down to the iron too because you only go to the iron to press between each step. 

I followed the machine pieced sampler construction in the Red Sky at Night pattern to cut my sashing and sew it all together.

Once I sewed it together, I kind of wished I'd used a quieter background. It feels a little more childish and noisy than I would like. These scraps are so beautiful, and the stars draw some attention away from them. Despite that slight tinge of disappointment, the goals of playing with batching scrappy blocks and trying something new were definitely achieved. I just loved getting completely lost in this quilt, hardly needing at all to stop and think and make decisions. This is the kind of playful refuge I've been trying to foster recently as a way of caring for myself - space to make things that don't matter, that are just there for the process. 

Now I just want to make ALL the Red Sky at Night blocks into whole quilts! There are so many in there that have been designed with the overall pattern in mind, that it would be fun to play with some of them without sashing too. 

Grab the Red Sky at Night e-book below, which includes 49 machine pieced blocks, all easily turned into full quilts as I have here, and 13 EPP blocks, completely with printable templates, if you're inspired by the idea of whole quilts with those blocks. Wouldn't they be beautiful?!