makingquilts

Making The
Comfort Quilts

1. The first step in making our comfort quilt was coloring the pictures of our smiling faces on white paper with fabric crayons. We made a pencil sketch of our faces first. Then we colored in the sketches with the special fabric crayons.

Here we are coloring our smiling faces on square paper with fabric crayons.

Each child made a self portrait with a smiling face to cheer up the children in Puerto Rico.

Fabric Crayon Self Portraits

We put our finished paper drawings of our self portraits up on the board to see what the quilt would look like when it was finished.

2. The second step was cutting white cotton fabric into square quilt patches so that every child could iron his or her picture onto a quilt square.

We started with a whole piece of white cloth. Our teacher held up the cloth and we talked about how we could divide it into small squares.

We folded the big cloth in half and cut it. Then we folded each of the halves in half again and cut again. This gave us four cloth squares. You can see three of them in the picture. The squares were still too big for quilt patches.

So we cut each of the four large squares in half. Then we had eight rectangles. You can see six of the rectangles in the picture.

When we cut the eight rectangles in half we had just the right size of white quilt patch squares we wanted. Then, we cut more white fabric the same way until we had enough squares for everyone in the class.

3. We ironed our fabric crayon pictures onto the white cloth squares. Each child watched Mrs. Ressa, our classroom helper, iron his or her picture onto a patch.

4. Next we cut blue fabric into strips to make rows and columns to frame the quilt patches.

We started with a big blue cloth on the floor so we could measure strips to frame the quilt patches.

We measured the cloth.

We cut 6 strips to make spaces for 5 rows with space for 5 quilt patches in each row.

We cut 6 more strips to make 5 columns. Now can you count the empty spaces to find out how many patches are in the finished quilt?

We put the cloth patches in the frame spaces then our teacher sewed the strips and patches together to make the front of the quilt.

Here is the quilt with the patches and fabric strips sewn together.

5. We wanted our quilt to have three layers: the top layer of the patches sewn together, a middle layer of soft quilt batting,and a back layer of blue print fabric.

Our class looked at all 3 layers of the quilt before the 3 layers were sewn together.

Here is the first finished quilt. We made a second quilt just like this one. Everybody in the class got to hold the first quilt and look at it.

Click here to learn more about sending quilt email and sending the quilts to Puerto Rico.

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	We started with a whole piece of white cloth. Our teacher held up the cloth and we talked about how we could divide it into small squares.
We folded the big cloth in half and cut it. Then we folded each of the halves in half again and cut again. This gave us four cloth squares. You can see three of them in the picture. The squares were still too big for quilt patches.
	So we cut each of the four large squares in half. Then we had eight rectangles. You can see six of the rectangles in the picture.
When we cut the eight rectangles in half we had just the right size of white quilt patch squares we wanted. Then, we cut more white fabric the same way until we had enough squares for everyone in the class.

	We started with a big blue cloth on the floor so we could measure strips to frame the quilt patches.
We measured the cloth.
	We cut 6 strips to make spaces for 5 rows with space for 5 quilt patches in each row.
We cut 6 more strips to make 5 columns. Now can you count the empty spaces to find out how many patches are in the finished quilt?
	We put the cloth patches in the frame spaces then our teacher sewed the strips and patches together to make the front of the quilt.
Here is the quilt with the patches and fabric strips sewn together.


Here is the first finished quilt. We made a second quilt just like this one.	Everybody in the class got to hold the first quilt and look at it.