Fifty eight fabrics.
That is what the fabric list of The Souks runs to, and only eight of them get a piece big enough to see on its own. The other fifty appear as strips an inch and a half wide, sewn into little sets and then cut apart at forty five degrees. It is a free chevron quilt pattern by Valori Wells for Robert Kaufman, it finishes at 60 by 78 inches, and the cover calls it a pattern for the confident beginner.
I want to tell you about one line in it before anything else, because it changes how you read the whole thing. Step 3 says, about how many strips to put in each set: there is no right or wrong. That is not the designer being vague. It is the design.
Download the Free Chevron Quilt Pattern
Ten pages, free, designed by Valori Wells, whose site is valoriwells.com, and published by Robert Kaufman in 2016. It features her Mystic collection.
Download The Souks pattern PDF
There is one labeling mistake in the cutting list that we found by checking all twenty five of the large pieces against their rows. It is further down, and it is worth reading before you cut Fabric W.
How the Chevron Happens Without Piecing a Single V
The quilt is ten vertical rows between two plain borders. Nothing is a block. Nothing is square.
Every piece in every row is a parallelogram: a rectangle with both ends cut off at forty five degrees. Within one row all the pieces lean the same way, so the row reads as a stack of leaning bars. Between one row and the next the lean reverses, and the pattern says so in the cutting instructions: rows 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 are cut one way, rows 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 the other. We measured the lean of all ten rows in the assembly diagram and it alternates without a single exception.
Where two rows meet, the angles point at each other and your eye joins them into an arrow.
That is the whole optical trick, and the assembly diagram shows it better than any description: the chevrons are not pieced. Nobody sews a V. They appear at the seam between two rows because the pieces on either side are tilted in opposite directions, and the rows are sewn together as plain straight seams.
It also means the rows do not have to line up. The pattern says so directly: do not worry about matching the seams, this is the feature of the random design of this quilt. A chevron quilt made from pieced V blocks punishes you at every intersection. This one has no intersections to punish you with.
Chevron, Herringbone, or Broken Chevron
The three words get used for the same quilt all the time, and here the difference comes down to one instruction.
A true chevron has the arms of each V meeting at a point, lined up across the whole quilt. A herringbone has them offset, so the arms step past each other instead of meeting, the way a parquet floor does. Both are built the same way. What separates them is whether the rows are aligned.
The Souks tells you not to align them. Do not worry about matching the seams, it says, this is the feature of the random design of this quilt. So the arms land where they land, and what you get is the broken version: a chevron quilt pattern that reads as herringbone from a few steps back and as a field of leaning bars up close.
If you want the crisp pointed version instead, nothing in the method stops you. Measure each row from a common starting line rather than letting the pieces fall where they fall. It is more work and it is not what the pattern is asking for, but the cutting is identical.
Two Kinds of Piece, and Only Eight Fabrics Get the Good Job
Each row alternates between large pieces and strip sets.
The large pieces are single rectangles, cut at an angle at each end. There are twenty five of them in the whole quilt and they come from just eight fabrics: A, B, S, T, U, W, Y and BB. Two or three per row.
The strip sets are where the other fifty fabrics live. You cut a 1 1/2 inch strip from every fabric you own, pair a dark with a light, sew pairs into sets of two, three, four and so on up to eight, then cut across the set at forty five degrees. The pattern gives the width to measure over for each row: 4 3/4 inches for Row 1, 6 1/2 for Rows 3 and 5, 5 for Row 7, 4 for Rows 2, 8 and 9, 6 3/4 for Rows 4 and 6, 6 for Row 10.
The example the pattern gives for Row 1 is worth reading slowly, because it is the only place the density is spelled out. Four strips, a large piece, three strips, six strips, four strips, a large piece, four strips, eight strips, four strips, a large piece, six strips. That is eleven units and forty two separate pieces, in one row, out of ten.
And here is the small thing that told me the pattern was written carefully: the cutting list gives exactly three large pieces for Row 1. The example says three large pieces. The example and the cutting list were written by someone looking at the same quilt.
Check Fabric W Before You Cut It
Every large piece in this pattern is cut to the height of the row it belongs to. Row 1 is 4 inches, so Row 1 pieces are 4 inches tall. Row 4 is 6 1/2, so Row 4 pieces are 6 1/2 tall. We checked all twenty five against the row width table.
Twenty four of them match. One does not.
The cutting list says: from Fabric W, cut one 3 1/2 by 14 3/4 Row 6 rectangle. Row 6 is 6 1/2 inches wide. A 3 1/2 inch piece cannot go in it.
The rows that are 3 1/2 inches wide are Rows 2, 8 and 9. Fabric W already has a Row 8 piece in the same list. And the length, 14 3/4, matches exactly the Row 9 piece cut from Fabric B. So the piece belongs in a 3 1/2 inch row, and Row 9 is where the numbers point.
Cut it at 3 1/2 by 14 3/4 as written, then place it when you lay the rows out. The one thing not to do is widen it to 6 1/2 so it fits the row the label names, because then it is longer than the row needs and you have used the wrong amount of a fabric that only gives you an eighth of a yard.
Every Edge in This Quilt Is Bias
This is the part the pattern mentions once and does not explain.
Woven fabric has lengthwise threads and crosswise threads. Both are stable. At forty five degrees to them is the bias, which has the least strength and the most stretch in the cloth. The usual advice for strip piecing is to cut across the straight grain precisely so you avoid stretchy bias edges.
The Souks does the opposite on purpose. Every cut in this quilt that is not a seam is a forty five degree cut, which means every angled edge you handle is bias. The pattern's own warning is a single clause: press the set carefully, since you are working with bias edges.
What that means at the machine:
Press, do not iron. Set the seam with the iron down, lift, move, put it down again. Sliding a hot iron along a bias edge stretches it, and once stretched it does not come back. If pressing is where your work usually loses its shape, our guide to pressing for crisper quilt blocks covers setting and rolling rather than pushing.
Sew with the bias underneath where you can, so the feed dogs carry it rather than the presser foot dragging it.
Offset the strips by a quarter inch when you start each pair, which the pattern shows in Figure 8. This is not decoration. It is what makes the ends line up after the angle is cut.
And keep your quarter inch exact, because a strip set of eight has seven seams in it and a drift of a thread in each one compounds across the set. Our notes on accurate quarter inch seams go through how to test yours.
The Ruler Does More Work Than the Machine
The method is a ruler method. The sewing is straight seams from start to finish.
Here is the sequence the pattern gives for cutting a strip set. Make the first cut at forty five degrees. Then lay the straight edge of your ruler along that cut, measure over by the width that row needs, and cut again. The second cut comes out at forty five degrees because the first one was.
Which means you need a ruler with a marked 45 degree line, and you need it for every piece in the quilt. There is no step in this pattern where a plain grid ruler will do. Our slotted rulers carry 30, 45 and 60 degree lines, and the rectangular and square acrylic rulers have the 45 marked across the diagonal.
The blade matters more than usual too. You are cutting through sets of up to eight layers of seamed fabric, across the seam allowances, on the bias. A blade that has gone dull will push the top layer sideways before it cuts, and on a bias edge sideways is a shape change, not a ragged edge. Our notes on cutting fabric accurately cover the rest of the setup.
Where the 58 Fabrics Come From
You are not meant to buy fifty eight pieces of fabric. The list asks for an eighth of a yard of nearly all of them, and an eighth of a yard is four and a half inches. What the pattern actually needs from most of those fabrics is one strip, an inch and a half wide, cut across the width.
That is a scrap quilt wearing a designer's fabric list. If you have been keeping leftovers, this is the pattern they were waiting for, and our guide to scrap quilt patterns covers sorting a pile into something you can actually sew from.
The only real constraint is pairing. Step 3 says to pair a dark with a light, or a bright with a dull, for each set. That is what makes the stripes read as stripes rather than as mud, and it is the one place where getting it wrong will show from across the room.
The eight fabrics that get large pieces do need a bit more. A gets 1 3/4 yards because it is also both borders. S, T, U, W, Y and BB get a quarter yard each.
For the back, the pattern asks for 4 yards, which assumes 40 inch fabric and means piecing two panels with a seam down the middle. A 60 by 78 quilt needs a backing of roughly 68 by 86, and 108 inch wide backing covers that from a single length with no seam at all. Our complete guide to quilt backing works through the margins. Binding is half a yard.
Why the Numbers Do Not Add Up, and Why That Is Fine
We check the arithmetic of every pattern we publish, and this one does not close. We would rather put the numbers on the page than leave them out, because here they are not a problem.
The ten row widths add to 47 1/2 inches. Add the two borders and you are at 61 or so, against a stated 60. The rows are made 82 to 84 inches long and the borders are trimmed to 80 1/2, for a quilt the cover calls 78 inches tall.
Those gaps are the squaring up. The pattern tells you to square the top of Row 1, sew it to the border, square the bottom, then square the top of Row 2 and sew it on, and so on down the quilt. The extra inches exist to be trimmed away as you go. A pattern built out of parallelograms cannot hand you an exact piece count, because the piece count depends on how many strips you decide to put in each set, and the pattern says outright that there is no right or wrong about it.
So treat the 60 by 78 as the size this chevron quilt came out at for the designer, not as a promise. If you want it to land on a particular bed, our quilt size chart has the mattress measurements, and the easiest adjustment here is the number of rows rather than the width of them.
If You Like This One
The nearest relative is the braid block, which also builds a leaning column out of strips, and Christen of I See Stars Quilting walks through a scrappy french braid that uses the same instinct with none of the angled cutting.
And if you want the opposite of fifty eight fabrics, we published Broken Perimeters this week, which is eight fabrics and twenty eight pieces in the entire quilt top.
One Last Thing
Most patterns tell you exactly what to do and the pleasure is in doing it well. This one tells you the angle, the widths and the pairing rule, and then hands the rest back to you. Eleven units in a row, or nine, or fourteen. Eight strips in a set, or two. Your scraps, in your order.
That is a different kind of afternoon, and it is worth knowing which kind you are in the mood for before you start cutting.
There are more of these in our free quilt patterns, most of them with a lot fewer decisions in them.
P.S. Cut one strip from every fabric before you sew anything, and lay the strips out in pairs first. The pairing is the only decision in this quilt you cannot fix later.
