No cutting, no points to match, and two collections that argue politely.
Juniper is a checkerboard of 5 inch charm squares. Thirteen across, sixteen down, 208 squares in all, and the throw finishes at 58 1/2 by 72 inches. Every square arrives at the right size, so there is nothing to cut for the top and nothing to trim afterward.
The two halves of the board come from two collections. Patchwork Carnival is the loud one, forty prints of checks, stripes, stars and dots with no two alike. Morning Mist is the quiet one, twenty prints in mossy greens and soft beiges. Alternate them square by square and the eye gets somewhere to rest between every bright square, which is what stops 208 prints turning into noise.
A checkerboard only reads as a checkerboard when its two halves differ. Hold a handful of each collection at arm's length and half close your eyes. If one pile stays separate from the other, the quilt will work. That is the only test worth running, and it is the test to use on any two collections of your own.
Download the Juniper pattern
Twelve pages, free to print, use and teach from. The fabric table for five sizes, the sorting, chain piecing a row, pressing so the seams nest, the layout, the binding counted side by side, and the arithmetic for a size of your own.
Download the free Juniper quilt pattern PDF
The fabric for this quilt is put together as the precut-friendly kit, counted for this pattern.
Everything you need to make this quilt
What you need
Three packs of Patchwork Carnival 5 inch squares and three of Morning Mist, forty to a pack. The throw takes 104 from each collection, so 16 of each are spare. The binding is 36 mini strips of 2 1/2 by 10 inches from a single pack, joined end to end at 45 degrees. Backing and batting are 66 1/2 by 80 inches, which is 2 1/4 yards of 108 inch wide fabric with no seam down the middle.
Four lengths, not one continuous strip
The binding goes on as four separate lengths, one for each side, each one trimmed to fit. There are no mitered corners to turn. The top and the bottom go on first and are trimmed flush with the sides. The two side lengths then run about 1/2 inch past the quilt at each end, and that overhang folds in before the binding turns to the back, which hides the raw end inside the fold.
Joined at 45 degrees, every seam eats about 2 1/2 inches, so n strips of 10 inches give 7 1/2n plus 2 1/2 inches of finished binding. The table in the pattern has the counts for all five sizes, and in the king the quilt is nearly square and all four sides take the same number.
Press one way, then the other
Press the seams of the odd rows to the left and the seams of the even rows to the right. That alternation is what makes the seam allowances butt up against each other when two rows meet, so the intersections lock without pinning gymnastics. Our guide to chain piecing covers the other half of the job, which is feeding the pairs through the machine without cutting the thread.
Holly is the same quilt built from a single collection, if you want it in winter blues. More in our free quilt patterns.
