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I am really excited about this project, so I thought that I would share it with “all” of you step-by-step, just in case you liked the results!

The Back Story – Sorry, this one needs it!

For a while, I have wanted a way to display a quilt on my wall that wasn’t just the typical hanging.  Since I don’t typically keep any of the quilts I make, I don’t have anything I have made to display.

Then, I read something on How About Orange about a project she did putting fabric on a canvas and then doing a freezer paper stencil.  So, I filed that little idea away.  I like it because it lets you showcase fabrics  you love in a unique way. Looking around the web, I realized that I was also drawn to groupings of canvases that work together to make a larger image.  So, I decided to incorporate these two ideas together with a twist by creating a quilt pattern out of canvases covered with fabric I love.

Originally, I had plans to follow the directions on How About Orange exactly, decoupaging the fabric and everything, but I wanted a more organic (and quite frankly faster) method, so I decided that I would just mount the fabric on canvas without.  This also gives me the choice to reuse the canvases if I ever want to change anything.

The Tutorial

1.  Find a blank wall in your house; the laundry on the floor in front of it is purely optional.  The area should be as large as you want your finished “quilt” to be.  This wall is in our bedroom opposite our bed.  And, after some furniture moving, it was a blank slate asking for a project.

2.  Gather together the canvases and fabric you want to use.  You can use any shape canvas you would like and will fit in your wall space.  I am sure that you could stretch your own, but I chose to pull together all that I had around the house, which was surprisingly a lot, and I ended up purchasing a few extras, but that was all I bought for this project!

As for fabric, you can pull a bunch together from your stash, or go buy the pieces that you would like to use.  For me, I used some fabric I already had.  I like to change the duvet cover on our bed fairly regularly.  And, with all our animals, we end up washing them quite a bit.  We have 5 or 6 that we cycle through, but we feel okay about it because they are all from Ikea and were wicked cheap.  The catch is that we never use the pillowcases that come with the duvet cover.  So, I decided to take those pieces, as they will already match the fabrics used in our room, and use them to cover the canvases for our quilt.

3.  My next step was figuring out my pattern.  I am a planner for projects like this one, so I got out my graph paper (I totally inherited this trait from my mother), and I made a template of all the canvases I had to scale.  This let me play around with the layout I wanted to use, which was important because the overall pattern of the quilt determined the pattern and fabric choice of each individual canvas.

4.  Next, I played with the design.  I went through two basic possibilities, and I tried to stick with the canvas sizes I already had, and I only ended up adding one that I didn’t already have.  I should also note here that the canvases I used were all made by different companies and are all different depths, so I kept that in mind as part of my design.

This was the pattern I came up with.  And, after I was sure that’s what I wanted to do, I glued everything down and outlined it all, so I had a template to refer back to during the whole project.

I decided on something symmetrical and straightforward, but that was largely because of the fabrics I knew I would be using.  If I had used the other set of fabrics I had been thinking about, my design probably would have taken on a more abstract shape.

5.  After I had a pattern, I spent some time with the fabric, matching up stuff that went well together, etc.  And, I decided how my blocks were going to look.  Then, I started cutting my fabric, starting with the background pieces.  To figure out how much fabric I needed for each block, I just laid the block in the middle and wrapped the fabric around it to get a guesstimate.  I didn’t need to measure precisely, but I knew that I didn’t want to come up short. (Note: On one block I did come up short and just sewed a few extra pieces on the sides of what I already had, and it was fine!)

With the blocks with more specific patterns, I lined things up more carefully, and used a quilting square to make sure that I had everything centered.  With these blocks, I was going for one of the sand dollars in the center and a piece of one on each of the four corners.

After I had everything cut, I ironed and starched all the pieces I was working with.  The starch helped smooth out the surface of each canvas, but I did consider (halfway through getting my canvases finished) that you could totally use batting between the canvas and the fabric.

6.  With everything starched and ready to go, I started putting the canvases together.  I started with a few blocks that were just one piece of fabric to get a feel for the stretching before working with the blocks that were pieced.

I first laid out the fabric wrong side up on my counter (you need a hard surface to use the staple gun).

I started by stapling two opposite sides down first.  This helped me quickly check if my pattern lined up where I wanted it to be.  While you are working with the staple gun, make sure that you have a hammer near by to tap in any of staples that don’t sit flush with the back of the canvas, as this might give you trouble when you are hanging everything.

7.  When I had these first two pieces tacked down, I trimmed down the fabric to make the next step a little easier.

8.  Next, I folded a tight corner at each of the corners, following the directions that How About Orange linked to, and stapled the ends down, trying to make sure that I kept everything tight.  And, after I got everything situated the way I wanted it, I trimmed the excess fabric away. The best thing about this was that if something wasn’t sitting right, I could just pull out the staples and redo it.

9.  This was the end result of this block.

Then, I just moved through each of the other blocks.  These four 6×6 canvases were the only ones that were just a solid piece of fabric.  All the other blocks were made up of appliqued pieces or were pieced.

10.  After I had all the blocks/canvases finished.  I gave my pattern to the boy and asked for some help hanging everything.  This part is a little tricky, particular since there are so many different heights.  He started by hanging the center block and moving out from there.  We kept a 3 inch strip of wall between each canvas, but I might consider doing it tighter if we do this again.

Overall, I am pretty happy with the way everything turned out.  But, I am not sure that the larger two blocks work the way that I was hoping for.  I might change out the fabric on those, so everything goes together a little better.  I am just going to live with this for the time being though to see if I really want to change it.

Obviously, choosing a squared off pattern would lend itself to group of hangings that looked more like an actual quilt, but I really liked the blending of art and fabric that this project used.