Make a heart quilt

1. Take seven printed fabrics, and cut 10, 5.5cm squares from each. Mix up the squares and stitch them together into three by three blocks with a 5mm seam allowance, making sure no two prints of the same are touching. Press each block and cut into quarters measuring 7.25cm square.

2. Mix up the squares and turn them all so the small square sits in the bottom right corner. To make a heart, you will need seven squares. Cut one in half diagonally from the bottom right to the top left. Then stitch the pieces together to make a rough heart shape (Fig.1). Press the seams flat. Repeat this three more times to end up with four hearts.

3. Download the heart template and print out. Cut four hearts from iron-on quilt wadding. Lay them on the wrong side of the patchwork panels leaving a border all round and press into place. Trim the excess fabric to 1cm from the wadding, clip curves and corners, fold in and tack.

4. Cut a 120cm square of cotton sheeting and place to one side, as this will be the back of the quilt. From the excess sheeting, cut four 24cm squares. Pin a heart to the centre of each square and oversew in place. Remove the tacking stitches.

5. Cut a 4cm x 55cm strip from each of the seven prints. Sew these together on the long sides and press the seams to make a panel 22cm x 55cm. Cut across the panel to make 15, 3.5cm strips. Join these end to end to make one continuous strip of blocks.

6. Take two heart squares and join them using a strip eight blocks long, then repeat with the other two heart squares. Join the two pairs and form a square using a length seventeen blocks long. Use the remaining strip as a border around the heart squares.

7. Tear two 4cm x 120cm strips from spare white sheeting. Use this to add a border with overlapped corners around the patchwork.

8. Cut 11, 10cm squares from each of the seven prints. Take 32 of these squares and make two strips seven squares long and two strips nine squares long. Stitch the shorter strips to the sides of the patchwork then add the longer ones to the top and bottom, matching up the seam lines neatly.

9. Add a second 4cm wide white border as before, joining strips if necessary to achieve the length needed. Use 44 of the remaining squares to make two strips 10 squares long and two strips 12 squares long. Stitch these to the edges of the quilt as before.

10. Press the entire quilt top and the square of white backing fabric. Lay the backing fabric on a flat surface, place the wadding centrally on top and add the quilt top face up over this. Pin the three layers together working from the centre out in all directions. There should be excess wadding and backing fabric all round.

11. Topstitch the quilt along the seam lines starting from the centre and working out to eliminate creases in the backing fabric. Either use a long machine stitch or running stitch if quilting by hand. Once the outer border has been quilted, the excess fabric from the underneath layers can be trimmed away.

12. Bind the edges of the quilt by tearing the leftover white sheeting into 4cm wide strips and joining end to end to make one continuous piece. Stitch the strips to the sides of the quilt and then the top and bottom to make an overlapped border as before. Turn the quilt over and turn under 5mm on the raw edge of the binding strip. Fold the strip over the raw edge of the quilt, mitring the corners as you do so, and slip stitch to the back of the quilt.