Brick House Quilt Directions

Some of you might remember a while back a blog reader, Roxanna sent a bunch of UFO’s to me.  They were meant to be sent out for charity projects and I meant to until I realized I make charity quilts and I could finish one of these for charity.  I ended up keeping this one….

You can read on how I was working on it HERE.

Here is is finished…

Roxanna sent a good start of the quilt…  in my sorting I realized that some blocks were oriented wrong.

See how the blocks are mirror images and not the same block?

I set the blocks to the left aside and I ended up making more blocks that were oriented the same way as the blocks on the right.

Gannon (pre Covid-19) helped me.

I have gone on to find out that Julie from Me and My Quilts was the originator of the idea.  You can read more about the quilt on her blog HERE.  You will find tons more of inspiration there on her blog.  What an accomplished quilter she is and a master at scraps.  Seriously I can tell you I’ve spent hours on her blog and have so many quilt ideas jammed in my brain about scraps, scrap use and quilts I want to make.

Well so many of you were excited about the quilt I was making and asked for directions.

I’m writing this post to give you an idea.  I don’t think it fair that I write a full pattern as it wasn’t my idea…but I will give you enough information for you to go on and make your own quilt.  Here goes…The quilt is 72″ x 90″.

The solid section of the block is made from two 2 1/2″ x 4 1/2″ rectangles.  The light part of the block is made from two 2 1/2″ x 2 1/2″ squares.

The block finishes in the quilt as a 4″ x 6″ block.  I wanted a twin sized-ish quilt as mine is going for a benefit.  I ended up making columns of blocks that were 15 blocks long.

I made 18 columns….

I made:
2 orange
1 royal blue
3 pink
3 gray
1 lavender
2 teal
2 green
2 yellow
1 chartreuse
1 purple

You can make whatever you want.  If you don’t have chartreuse, use a different color.  If you hate pink, don’t use it.  If you want it boy-ish, pick different colors.  Whatever you want goes.

Here’s how block construction goes….

The pieces are going to fit together like this…

Lay the square on the rectangle.  Chain piece them through.

At the ironing board, lay the like this.

Lift the rectangle and iron pressing the seam to the colored part.

You’ll have this…
At the machine take the two piece and put them right sides together.  The pieces MUST all be oriented the same way for each block.  I put mine with the bottom piece, square going in the machine first and the top piece with the rectangle going in first.

Press block…and there you have it.

It’s an easy block to construct.  The trick of the whole quilt is to make sure ALL of the block pieces on the final seam are oriented the same way.  If you don’t, this is what you end up with…

Roxanna the person who gifted this did it.  I did it too.  You don’t want to spend time with the seam ripper.

In the original quilt Julie had a row that was low volume.  I made a couple rows that were and tried putting them in the quilt and didn’t love it.  I went on to make more low volume blocks and put together this baby quilt top…

Once it is finished I’ll write more about it and talk about low volume fabrics and fabric selection for this quilt.  I have a couple other fun things planned with this.  I can’t wait to show you.

The baby quilt version is 10 columns each 7 blocks long.

I hope you can go on and make one of these quilts, it would make the PERFECT leader and ender project.

P.S.
I’ll put a link in the right hand column under the tutorial section for this blog post so you can reference it any time you want.  Happy Quilting!