Design Your Own Barn Style Mini Quilt

Today I'm sharing some more details on my barn style mini quilt, with some ideas on how you can mod and design your own barn style mini quilt.You, yes you, can branch out and create something truly unique. Just by playing with half square triangles, and split quarter square triangles, you can arrive at a myriad of different layouts, and have the fun of coming up with your very own original quilt! I want to free you up from merely following a pattern, without all the fuss of starting from scratch.I started with the Moda Love Star pattern as the foundation for this mini.You will see when you download this pattern, the smallest size you can make is 32". I was really after a much smaller one, so I changed the block size to get a finished size of 20 inches. This still works well with a charm pack, and you'll have some trimmings left over to make another little project.

So following along with the Moda Love Quilt quantities, here are the sizes that you'll need to make a 20" sized mini...Each square will finish at 2.75", so you will need to cut the background squares at 3.25", and cut the squares for the half square triangles at 3.75". This little graphic is another quick refresher of how to sew two at a time easy half square triangles.

What I'm most excited about showing you today however, is how to add in some different elements into your quilt like I did with mine.

This was the design I settled on for the mini that I made, and as you can see, I've used some smaller triangles, which add some other intersting angles to the mix. These are called Split quarter square triangles, and are really easy to make.

For the quarter triangle section, you start with a larger half square triangle section that will be cut in half to make the quarters. For this sized quilt, your original squares need to be 4.25", then sewn into two half square triangles (right pic).

Then layer a second 3.75" square on top of this, and rule a line on the opposite diagonals to the seam of the half square triangles underneath. Sew 0.25" either side of this line as before, cut apart and press.

The right one is untrimmed, and the left is squared up and trimmed to 3.25".

I simply switched out eight of the half square triangles of the original quilt pattern, and substituted with these split quarter square triangles.To make 8 of these, you will need:

• 4.25" square 2 x background colour
• 4.25" square 2 x main colour
• 3.75" square 2 x main colour

And then you get the fun of choosing where to put them in your quilt.Here are a couple of other options for you:

Lay out your squares, and move them around, varying the positions of the half square triangles and split quarter square triangles. You'll be amazed at the combinations you can achieve, and how varying the colour palette changes everything again. Snap a pic of each design that you come up with on your phone, before you lose that brilliant design when someone interrupts you!I hope this gives you some ideas on how to mod your own barn style quilt. I'd love to see what you come up with!Next week I will be adding a tutorial for the cute pompom pincushion that I also made for the swap.