I used medium weight, high thread count cotton to create the cover. Now I have a modern home, and patchwork quilts are just too “country,” so I pieced mine in much larger pieces. Below are a couple of examples.

In one case, a queen-size black oriental themed quilt, I used a solid piece of black with gold dragons across the entire width of the top and the bottom. I believe I just bought a piece as long as the blanket was wide, and then cut it in half lengthwise to make the top and bottoms bands. The middle of the quilt was a piece of black cotton with cinnabar and jade colored medallions printed on it. I sewed together two pieces to make the center. The back was a plain solid black cotton, again sewed just two pieces together. I made sure the covers were at least 2″ wider (1″ on each edge) and longer than the blanket to be covered. After sewing the covers, I used the floor to made a sandwich of the back cover (raw seam facing up), acrylic blanket, and top cover (good side facing up). I aligned and smoothed it out carefully. Then I took a big jar of pins and pinned it everywhere I wanted to “quilt” the pieces together – the medallion design in the center provided a good dispersion of locations, so I just followed that. The top and bottom pieces weren’t big enough to worry about shifting, so I didn’t quilt them. Then I got a bag of jade-looking glass beads (the largest size of “seed” bead) , a bag of gold flat washer-shaped beads (all metal – you do NOT want to use plastic for this), and a couple of skeins of cinnabar colored cotton embroidery floss. Over several days, I replaced each pin with a tack using the embroidery floss and two beads. Starting from the back, I pushed the needle up through the whole quilt at the center of each “medallion,” leaving about 2 inches of floss hanging loose on the back side. I put my beads on, washer first, then bead, then passed the needle back through the washer and quilt while holding the loose end of floss with my other hand. I made sure to put about 1/16″ between the entry and exit points on the back side, so there would be some fabric there to anchor the tack. Once the floss was tight, I tied a simple double knot and trimmed the floss off to about an inch, forming a little tassel. Once all the tack-quilting was done, I decided I didn’t like the plainness of the join between the top and bottom panels and the main body of the cover, so I bought some gold upholstery braid (be sure to get one that washes well), and covered those seams with the braid, hand applied. To finish, I used black satin blanket binding on all edges. The result has lasted ten years and probably twice as many washings, and still looks great.

Another project was a twin-size lighthouse quilt for a boy’s room using four printed cotton panels intended for use as wall hangings, pieced with black cotton, buttons for the tack points, “rope” looking trim, a solid red cotton back, and red wide bias tape to finish the edges. You could do the same with pillow panels.

These take about two weeks to complete if you work on them about an hour a day, and cost less than $30 for materials if you shop carefully. The lighthouse quilt cost about $9 because I got all of the components on clearance.

Happy quilting!