Chinese Coins

A few weeks ago, I had talked about a stack of 6-inch squares that I had received from our Charity Bee. I was excited to see exactly what those disparate blocks would inspire!! The first quilt was the Pinwheel and was a flying success!!

Now it was time to use a few more of them….

Last year I had stumbled onto http://www.maryquilts.com and found many fun patterns with free pdf downloads. One, in particular, caught my eye…. an Easy Chinese Coin Quilt …..

I wanted to make this as a charity quilt so knew that I would need to change the size of the quilt to something like this…..

I remembered this idea when I was cleaning up scraps and carefully put aside any 1.5-inch strips that were in the 2-inch to 6- inch range. I also cut up 30 of the 6-inch squares to supplement my scrap stack…..

Now the fun started!!

I began by pairing up the strips and soon had a nice stack of “doubles”…..

I wanted this quilt to be completely random, so I threw the strips into a box and made my self look away when I picked the two strips sets that were to be sewn…..

Very quickly, the 2’s became 4’s…..

…and the 4’s became 12’s.

At this point, I stopped and trimmed the strip sets down to the 5.5 inch size that I wanted……

After I had plenty of 5.5 inch sets, I started working on the 1.5 and 3.5 inch sets and, without a lot of thought, I had the coin strips all finished…..

I auditioned several fabrics for the setting columns but the navy blue was the ONLY way to go.

I LOVE this top…..

….and hope that it will make the recipient smile!!

It was super easy and fast to make but has a pleasing complexity as well.

There will DEFINITELY be more of these in my future!!