Patchwork Puzzle Part 1 (The Inspiration)

I decided if I was going to write about how I made my Complications Quilt it deserved a better name so Patchwork Puzzle is it.  I really debated if & how I wanted to share about this since I based my quilt off of someone else's design but since so many of you have asked for it and asked for instructions in English I decided I would share how I went about making my quilt.

I was originally inspired by this beauty over on flickr.  I was taken by how the blocks just seemed to flow together and then when you really started looking you saw the detail of each of the blocks.  After doing some digging through different photos in her stream and reading the comments I found that Christiane had based her quilt on a Block of the Month.  Please follow the link to the original as it is incredible.  There you will find all of the post if you want to make the quilt as it was intended.

There were a lot of things I found really difficult about following along.  First the instructions were all in German and even with Google Translate I had a hard time.  I would also consider myself to be a intermediate level quilter so I wanted to avoid y-seams and other complicated techniques that I didn't think I could complete successfully.  I also had a hard time calculating some of the measurements since they included eighth of an inch and so forth.  In the end I decided to just base all of my measurements on a unfinished 2 1/2 inch square (and there are a ton of them in this quilt).  The other thing that threw me a little was the amount of open space in the quilt once all of the blocks were done.  I filled most of mine with an combination of 2 1/2 and 4 1/2 inch squares.  But I also made duplicates of several blocks.

How I put together slabs of the quilt

 As I mentioned before I also wanted to avoid partial seams and y-seams so for a lot of my blocks I cut all of the pieces but I didn't always sew them all together until I started making the top.  This allowed me to build the quilt top in sectors and avoid any complicated seams.

Notice not all of the seems are sewn together

So what do you need?  I used parts of two fat quarter bundles to make my quilt and had a relatively large amount of scraps left over.  Since the scrappy factor is what makes this quilt extra cool this would be a great project to dig into your scrap bags for.  The first several blocks can be cut from jelly roll strips so really this is a grab bag of fun.  My quilt finished at 63 by 72 inches.

Ready to get started making your own patchwork puzzle?  I'll be posting my tips for the first block soon so please check back.