carol45

One thing: If you have people cutting try to make sure that the cutting tables are high enough, otherwise people are going to end up with back aches.

QuiltBaer

I had a couple of sew days at the shop asking customers to come in and help make quilt for veterans. I used the Take 5 block. I had pieces cut for each block. And if some seam allowances were different, I could square up all the blocks
to the same size. It worked great.

NT66

QuilterBaer
I like your idea! A layout of 5 x 6 12" blocks will meet the 60" x 72" that they are shooting for!
And it would be pretty easy cutting; only 4 1/2" squares, 8 1/2" squares and 4 1/2" x 8 1/2" rectangles!
Great suggestion!

tesspug

You could bind them by leaving the backing larger and bringing it around to the front and sewing it down. There are lots of tutorials on how to. Eleanor Burns has one.

junegerbracht

I would start very slowly - my experience working with groups is that skill level is all over the board. While it is always nice to nurture the art it can slow the process and at times be very frustrating. Lower your expectations and you won’t be disappointed.

Rose_P

I don't think anyone mentioned that if you do decide to do some cutting ahead of time, it's probably a good idea to decide what fabric will be used for backing and set that aside, assuming it's coming from this same yardage as the blocks. It would be bad to come up at the end with nothing but small bits.

Also, I was going to suggest for the newbies that Jordan Fabric's email today has a new video showing how to make a stacked coins quilt (They called it "Balancing Act"). The instructions are on Youtube and are very clear and easy to follow. This is a very fast quilt to make and beginner friendly because no seams match. Donna Jordan starts with fat quarters plus plain yardage for the background fabric. She specifies cutting strips of a certain size, but I believe it could easily be changed to some that are the standard widths of some rulers so that you could work even faster. Also, you'd have to do a little calculating to figure out how many strips are needed for a quilt of your target size, or if you're making multiple quilts from the same pattern, you could just make the strip sets and divvy them up to get the size needed. It looks very forgiving.

The Jordan version is 72" X 90", and since that's 50% bigger than you're aiming for, 2 times the quantities of fabric given in the video would make 3 quilts of the size you're making, if you stay with her strip sizes. In that case, however, your coin stacks would run sideways across shorter dimension of the quilts instead of up and down. I'm sure the kids will love the quilts just as well. I remember as a kid loving to look at all the different fabrics in my grandmother's quilts.

Wishing you and your group a happy time with this project!

cathyvv

Offset the blocks by 1/2 block and don't worry about seams matching. Do make sure that the seams are NOT less than 1/4 inch wide. Quilt blocks do separate when the seams are less than 1/4 inch wide.

cathyvv

You can also make coin quilts with jelly rolls. Sew 4 strips together width of fabric, then cut into 8" sections. Assuming minimum of 42" wide strips, you usually get 5 of them.

Do the same with the remaining strips. Then 'artfully' attach the 8" wide sections together in columns to be the length you want the quilt to be. Change the order of the sets of 8" sections in each column so that minor seam differences will be less noticeable.

To make the quilt a bit wider you can sash it with a coordinating solid fabric. Or just border it. To make it longer, insert a coordinating solid between the 8" sections you cut from the 4 strips. Have fun.

This is an easy quilt to make, but I admit could be a bit confusing to the true beginner.

pchp

I would not suggest having multiple people cut up the fabric for "kits". I got a donation quilt kit from my guild with 5" squares. Unfortunately, the 5" squares were not consistent, so I did a lot of trimming to get them the same size. I wasn't present for the "cutting" day, but I have heard that different rulers may give slightly different measurements. In addition, some quilters are more accurate in their cutting than others. Maybe select the fabric for the kit first, then give all of that fabric to the same person to cut?

themadpatter

If you want to do 9 patch (or even 4 patch, I suppose) I'd do strip sets if I were you. More cutting, but less sewing and they are more likely to be more accurate.