Chevron Quilt Tutorial

I have been eyeing chevron (zigzag) quilts for a while now and the immanent arrival of my sisters baby gave me a great excuse to try this kind of quilt. I could also use plenty of the fabric left over from my Polaroid Quilt.
I looked for tutorials online but struggled a bit to understand them, so I thought I would add a quick bit of help for anyone who would like to make a similar zigzag quilt.

Chevron Quilt Tutorial:

To start I chose 2 contrasting fabrics, a white and a blue stripe cotton. Cut them into squares. 

Lay the fabrics on top of each other with the right sides facing each other. Then draw a pencil line from corner to corner. Trust me, you want to draw this line- I have tried eyeballing it, it it is waaaay too hard. 

Now, sew two straight seams on either side of the pencil line. I used the edge of my presser foot to guide me to keep the stitches parallel with the pencil line. I have done it in red thread to make it easier for you to see:

Cut down the pencil line to create two triangles:

Open out the triangles to form squares again. I ironed them open and I trimmed the corners to make them square. I don't think this is strictly necessary but it helped me to then start treating them as one piece.

And this is where it gets interesting. In the next two photo's I've shown you how these two triangles add together to form the pattern.

Lol! So, I only made 1 set of triangles but I used a bit of Gimp photo magic to show you how this all fits together to make the quilt:

And on to the quilt shots: (What a kind husband/clothes line!)

It was pretty overcast (yay UK!), so the colours are a bit odd but here is a close up of the quilt itself.

I used a lazy binding which is simply awesome. I folded over the backing towards the front quilt piece. (It's like wrapping a present but you fold it over from the back, making nice corners with an iron). I then top stitched the whole lot down. It saved me from the inevitable heartache of fighting with binding and is MUCH neater than I have ever achieved.

I used a deep red spotty fabric for the reverse and added my own label so the baby will know its from me in years to come.

I really like the spotty fabric as a backing because it shows off the quilting I did in the ditch of the seams: 

Thanks husband! No need to look so scary ;)

Leave a comment if you have any questions on how to make this type of quilt. It comes together far faster than expected and it feels awesome to see it take shape.

Happy Quilting!