Welcome to week 4 of the Car Seat Cover Sew Along!
This week we're turning our quilt blocks into the quilt top for the seat covers. It's a quick one. All we're doing is adding pieces around the blocks until the whole thing is wider and longer than our seat cover template.
This should go pretty quick so this is a good week to get caught up if you’ve fallen behind.
My Seat Cover Design
I have my four blocks finished. They're from the Crystal Creek quilt by The Blanket Statement, and I'm so happy with how they turned out. I'm making these seat covers for my husband's car, and since we're both D&D people, I'm going for a D20 vibe and wanted the blocks to look more like dice.
A Quick Detour: Raw Edge Applique
To make them look like dice, I added numbers to each block with raw edge applique. This technique is pretty straightforward. Ideally you would use some kind of double sided adhesive like splendid web or heat n bond. Just iron it onto the wrong side of your fabric, trace your number, cut out, peel the paper back and press onto your block. Then stitch around ⅛” away from the edge using a short stitch length.
The process is straightforward but I will tell you I did not enjoy it! This requires a lot of fiddling and adjusting. I hated every minute of it but I managed get through stitching down all the numbers on my blocks. I also didn’t have any splendid web on hand so I just used a glue stick and added some interfacing to my numbers. It worked great!
For those who are curious about which numbers I used, I picked 20 (obviously), 13 because my husband and I were married on the 13th, and then we let a die decide the last two, which landed on 18 and 6. I considered doing a 1 but that felt too much like tempting the dice gods.
Now that are blocks are officially dice let’s make the quilt top!
Building the Quilt Top
The goal this week is a pieced top that's bigger than your template all the way around. We'll trim it down after quilting. Things are likely to shift while we’re quilting so you’ll want your top to extend well past the edge of your template.
1. Lay everything out on your template.
Because the blocks are large, I moved to the floor for this. Place your blocks on the template and decide where you want them. My blocks were already almost as wide as the seats, so I didn't need to add much width. I also wanted to avoid losing any of the design, so I adjusted the placement before adding anything.
2. Add strips to the sides.
I started by adding a 2 inch strip to the outside of each block. The two blocks for the top of the seat got slightly wider strips on their sides. Once those were stitched on and pressed, I had plenty of width.
3. Add length.
Next I added one more skinny strip to the bottom of the blocks to get enough length.
4. Fill in the gaps.
I had a gap of about 5 1/2 inches between the pieces, so I added a 6 inch wide piece the same length as the block. I added another long strip at the shoulders and a large square for the headrest.
5. Press and check against your template.
Lay your template over the top. Everything should extend past it on every side.
Goals for this Week
Turn your blocks in to quilt tops! That’s it!
Up Next
That's all for this week! Here's what's coming next:
- Week 5: We'll baste and quilt. I'm planning simple straight lines. I did something more complicated on my last set and it took forever, so I'm keeping it easy this time.
- Week 6: We'll figure out the attachment points, add elastic and knit, and turn these into actual seat covers that slip over the seats.
We're almost there!
