One of my other hobbies has been making things for dolls houses. Now one of my grand-daughters likes to play with some of the (sturdier) pieces, I'm aware that there is a shortage of bedding. I found some of the old bedding recently, and although cute (I made it when I was 9) it is distinctly moth-eaten and age-stained. Jane loves her own quilt, which I made her a few years ago. So I thought I'd make a quick quilt or two for the dolls house.
Making a quilt in 1/12th scale could be very fiddly (especially if you aim for perfection). I wanted to make something very quickly before Jane tired of the dolls, so I came up with a quick way.
To find out how to make a mini quilts for a dolls house (or for a Barbie type doll), read on.
First, choose some fabrics with the smallest possible prints. (Or plain if you prefer.) Mine are a few pieces extracted from a 4" /10 cm charm pack. (This is for a 1/12th scale quilt. For a Barbie house, I'd use larger squares. You could use these 4" ones, but it would be easier with larger squares - you'd need fewer of them!)
I chose about 12 different designs. For example:
However, this will depend on how large you want your finished quilt to be. My 12 x 4" / 10cm squares would make a finished quilt of 9 x 12 squares - worked out about 8 x 12 inches - without a border. This would make a very large king size quilt for a dolls house bed, or maybe a smaller single quilt for a Barbie or Cindy doll. Alternatively, as I finally made, the same number of squares can make two smaller quilts, each with a little border.
Next, divide each square into three horizontally, so you have strips 4" (10 cm) x 1 1/3" (3.3 cm). (The lines on the image below are not accurate, just indicative.)
Next, lay them all out as squares again, but with three different strips for each square. I mixed mine up as much as possible. This is not all of them but gives you an idea of the selection. The little heap bottom left is the next process, which is to pin the three strips of each set together (right sides together) so that they can be sewn to make one complete square again. They are sewn with about 1/4" - 5/16th seam allowance (6.5mm- 8.5mm). Theoretically you should be left with about 3/4" or 1.8cm between the seam allowances - I'm not that accurate. I'm happy as long as I've got at least 5/8th inch squares in the end!
(They will actually will no longer be square at this point, because you've reduced them in one dimension by the seam allowance.)
Here are a couple of the new 'squares', after being sewn and pressed. Make sure you do press them at each stage.
Next, chop them in 3 once more, this time vertically, so that each of the new strips has three little squares (look like oblongs at this stage) of different colours.
So, here are a few of the new strips, once cut:
Next job: to rearrange strips, as before, into a pleasing pattern. Obviously, you can play around with this as you like. My finished quilt doesn't bear much resemblance to this, by the time I'd decided to make a few switches. (And that doesn't reflect the final shape, either.) Then pin the sets of three together, and sew and press them, as before.
So by this stage, you are probably thinking - this looks as though it's going to be huge. But remember that I said your squares are only likely to end up about 5/8th of an inch - 3/4" if you are more careful than me. Look at the quilt below part way through - the top portion is almost finished. It's all sewn bar the three right hand strips which are pinned to the rest. See how much smaller it is than the bottom portion which hasn't been sewn yet. So, get pinning and sewing as before.
I had intended to sew all the bits back into 3 x 3 squares before attaching them all together, but I was impatient to see what it was going to look like. I certainly started by sewing three strips into one square a few times, but then I started attaching some of the squares together before completing the rest of the squares. It doesn't matter how you do it as long as you know where you are!
If you count the squares, you can see that what I'm aiming for is a quilt 9 squares by 12 squares. It still looks a bit of a mess at this stage (especially as I did this one really fast for the tutorial) - but just wait, it will look fine when finished. So carry on sewing it all together to make one bigger rectangle or square.
There are several different ways to finish it, depending on the look you want. Here's what I think is the simplest, which I used to make one large quilt of 12 x 9 squares.
Once it is all sewn together, cut a piece of fabric big enough to form the backing or lining. In the case of my 12 x 9 squares, it was about 10" x 8" give or take. So 25.5cm x 20cm. But cut a piece that will fit your quilt. In my demo below, this was just a piece of pale pink cotton. But, whatever you like. Place this and your quilt right sides together,
Stitch round the whole thing apart from a gap of about 2.5"-3" (say 8cm) for turning. It may be a bit hard to see on this, but the gap is at the top to the right of the middle.
The gap is on the left side in this picture, where you see the pink, spotty, and blue floral squares.
Once it's sewn, clip the corners and trim any loose bits, ready to turn it the right side out through the gap. I often use a thin ended chopstick to poke the corners out.
For some reason, I forgot to take a photo of the quilt turned the right side out before I started chopping it up to make two smaller ones. So you'll have to deduce what it looked like from the picture of the back.
Another alternative for finishing, again with a backing of the same size, is to place them WRONG sides together, and sew a binding tape all the way round. You'll need to use narrow tape, such as half inch tape, which you will treat as double fold - so you end up with 1/4" showing back and front. This won't replicate the look of a full size bias binding tape, but will look as though you have an extra wide binding of about 3".
I think my preferred route is to add a border. Now the 12 x 9 square piece I made was a bit too large for a border, In fact, I could get two smaller quilts with borders from it. So that's what I'll describe next.
First, I dismantled the quilt from its backing, then I unpicked the centre line to give me 2 pieces of quilting 6 squares by 9. I could use the original backing (cut down a bit) to back one of these quilts, but I had to cut another backing for the second one.
Each was placed wrong side together with its backing. You could use wide bias tape for the border, as I did, or strips of fabric. You need to make 4 strips, on for each side, which is the length of the quilting plus double the width of the folded bias tape plus seam allowance (I had about 1/8" seam allowances for the border.) You need to mitre the corners.
Obviously, you won't make yours as crooked as mine. Since I took this photo, I did unpick the fourht line in and strighten it a bit. But it still looks delightful on the bed.
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