Download the free Woven quilt pattern PDF from Robert Kaufman Fabrics. Eight pages, finished quilt 60 inches by 70 inches, designed by Elizabeth Hartman.
The name is the instruction. Look at any row and the crosses do not sit side by side, they hold hands: the middle bar of each block runs the full ten inches and meets the bar of the block beside it, so a row reads as one continuous band. Then the next row is offset by half a block, and the bands appear to pass over and under each other. Nothing is appliqued, nothing is curved, and no piece is anything but a rectangle.
The block is a five patch, built on a five by five grid of two inch units, which is the family The Quilter's Bible describes as twenty five units to a block. Here is the part worth knowing before you cut: the pattern does not have you sew twenty five squares. Where neighboring units share a fabric it cuts them as one piece, so the block goes together as fifteen rectangles in five rows. A bar three units long instead of three squares, a pair instead of two singles. Same grid, ten fewer seams in every block.
Each row is three pieces. Background, feature, background, in that order all the way down, with the widths changing from row to row: two units, one, two at the top and bottom; one, three, one on rows two and four; and two, one, two again in the middle, except that there the outer pieces are the feature fabric and the single unit at the center is background. That center square of background is the hole in the cross, and it is what keeps the quilt from reading as a grid of solid plus signs.
Twenty three fabrics make the blocks. Nineteen of them yield two blocks each, one yields a single block, and three are set aside for the half blocks that finish the offset rows. That comes to thirty nine full blocks and six half blocks, three facing left and three facing right, which fill seven rows of sixty inches. The background is one fabric throughout and it takes two and a half yards.
Elizabeth Hartman designed this one, and Robert Kaufman published it in 2016 to show her Pacific line. Her patterns are on her own site, where the address printed inside the PDF now redirects. The cover gives the level as Experienced Intermediate, with the line "I know the ropes and would like to test my skills."
Pattern details
- Name: Woven
- Brand: Robert Kaufman Fabrics
- Designer: Elizabeth Hartman
- Finished size: 60" x 70", throw
- Skill level: experienced intermediate, printed on the cover
- Block: a 10 inch five patch on a grid of 2 inch units, a cross with a background square at its center, plus 5 inch half blocks for the offset rows
- Techniques: straight rotary cutting, rectangles only, rows pieced and joined, no triangles and no templates
- Fabrics: 23 feature fabrics at a fat eighth each, plus 2 1/2 yards of background, 4 yards of backing and 5/8 yard of binding
- Precuts: fat eighths or quarter yards, as the pattern itself offers
- Pages: 8
Six hundred and forty five pieces, and five ways to cut them
That is the real count: thirty nine blocks at fifteen pieces and six half blocks at ten. It sounds like a mountain until you look at what the pieces are. Every one of them is two and a half inches tall. The only thing that changes is the width, and there are five widths in the whole quilt: one and a half, two and a half, three and a half, four and a half, and six and a half inches.
So the cutting is not forty five different operations. It is five strip widths, subcut. The background alone accounts for three hundred and eighty one of the pieces, and it comes off just twenty four strips.
Counted against what the blocks need, the pattern cuts one hundred and sixty eight of piece F, two hundred and seven of G and six of H. Thirty nine blocks want four F and five G each, the six half blocks want two F, two G and one H each, and the totals land exactly. There is nothing spare in this pattern, so a miscut background piece means going back to the yardage.
Fabrics and palette that suit this construction
The quilt in the photograph is built from one idea: every block is a single fabric against the same background, and the fabrics are arranged so the rows drift from dark navy through teal to pale gray. It reads as one designed thing rather than as a scrap quilt, and that is a choice you make at the cutting table, not at the sewing machine.
Two ways to go. Arrange your twenty three fabrics in a value run, dark at one edge and light at the other, and you get the gradient in the original. Shuffle them at random and you get something closer to a planned scrap quilt, which works too but needs the values spread evenly rather than clumped. What does not work is a background that competes. This one has to sit still behind forty five blocks.
Twelve of the twenty three in the original are Kona Cotton solids and the rest are prints from the Pacific line. Kona is still made under the same name; Pacific came out in 2016 and is long gone, so treat the SKU list in the PDF as a record of what was photographed rather than a shopping list. A fat eighth of each is all the pattern asks, which makes this an unusually good home for a fat quarter bundle you bought because it was beautiful and then could not cut into.
On the background, buy the full two and a half yards in one cut. It is a single fabric across all forty five blocks, and a dye lot change halfway through a quilt like this shows.
The cuts and the finishing, worked through
Since every piece is a straight cut and the block has no bias anywhere, accuracy here is the ruler and the blade rather than the sewing. How to cut fabric accurately covers the checks that fix most of it, and with strips this long it matters more than usual. If 60 by 70 is not the size you want, our quilt size chart has the finished measurements to aim for, and this design grows in ten inch steps in both directions.
The backing is four yards cut into two lengths of sixty eight inches and joined down the long side, which is the standard two panel back explained in our guide to quilt backing. A three yard cut of 108 inch wide backing covers a 66 by 78 inch back with no seam at all, which is the other way to do it. The binding is seven strips of two and a half inches, the usual start for machine sewn binding.
And if the twenty three fabrics are coming off your own shelves rather than out of one bundle, how to sort your scraps deals with the sorting problem this pattern really poses, which is value rather than color.
More free patterns are in our free quilt patterns collection, and the ones in this vein are gathered in modern quilt patterns.
