A fidget quilt usually starts with a plan. You pick a size, count the squares, and then you owe yourself all of them before anything looks finished. Laura Coia builds hers one square at a time and stops when it is big enough.
She calls them building blocks, and the rest follows from that. Fusible fleece cut at 6 inches, a scrap of fabric fused to the rough side, and then whatever is on the table goes on top. An old zipper. A belt buckle. Curtain rings, lace, velvet, a strip of fur. Each square is finished on its own, so none of them waits on the square beside it.
Her measurements carry the method. She settled on 6 inches because a square that size holds a ribbon or two and still keeps everything inside the reach of one hand. The strips that join the squares are fabric tape she makes herself, anywhere from 1 1/2 to 2 inches, and she lands at 1 3/4. That tape lies over the joins and gets topstitched, and the single line of stitching catches the square, the tape and the backing at once. The quilting happens while the quilt goes together, not after it.
The video has passed 135,000 views since 2018.
Most of the twelve minutes is spent on what goes wrong, which is why it holds up for anyone who has made one before. Keep the outer edge of every square clear, because anything hard sitting in a seam allowance cannot be sewn over. Stitch a scrap across the metal ends of a zipper before they reach that edge. Fill a pellet pocket, then shake the pellets into one corner and pin them there, a half inch clear of the seam you are about to close. And she picks flannel for the backing on purpose. It is soft, and unlike satin it stays put on a lap instead of sliding off.
If you want ours written out from the first square through to the binding, we wrote that here: how to make a fidget quilt.
Laura's channel is SewVeryEasy.
