How to Make a Quilt {Part 6} Assembling your quilt top

Welcome back!  Now that we have made all of our blocks, we are ready to assemble them all together and make our quilt top! 

You will first lay your blocks out in this order:

We are going to start by sewing our blocks into rows of six blocks each.

I like to gather up the blocks for one row and place them in a pile in order like this:  

Take the first two blocks from the pile:

Lay them right sides together:

and then sew a 1/4" seam:

You will then get your next block from your pile:

Place it right sides together with the second block and then sew a 1/4" seam:

You will keep adding blocks until you have a row of six.

Sew all your blocks into rows so that you have six rows of six.  You will want to press all your rows.  Press rows 1, 3 and 5 seams to the right and press rows 2, 4, and six to the left.  This will be important so that we can nest our seams when we are ready to sew our rows together.

You will then take rows 1 and 2:

 Place them right sides together and sew a 1/4" seam.  

To get your blocks to all intersect at the right points you will want to nest your seams.  This simply means that you will have one seam going to the right and one seam going to the left. 

To make sure they don't move once you nest them together--place a pin in each of the intersections and take them out as you get to them when you sew your seam.

Since I took the extra time to pin where all my seams met I got my blocks to match up perfectly:

You will continue to sew your rows together until you have your quilt top:

If you are making the lap size quilt here is the block layout.  You will follow the exact same instructions but you will have more rows and your rows will also have more blocks:

Next week we will finish up our quilt! :) 

Talk to you soon,

You can find the rest of this series here.