I just finished making this baby blanket for my cousin's new baby boy. The rainbow colors just make me happy! I spent the week singing "Over the Rainbow" and craving skittles! I liked making a strip rag quilt, as opposed to a rag quilt with squares, because you don't have to deal with the tricky intersections. It comes together really quickly, with all straight seams. Below are my directions for making a rainbow baby blanket. You could, of course, make this with any fabrics. Just keep in mind that only 1" of each strip will show, so avoid big patterns.
Strip rainbow rag quilt tutorial:
Supplies:
3/4 yard each of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple flannel
Rotary Mat, ruler, blade
Ragging Shears
Iron your fabric, but
DO NOT PREWASH
Using your rotary cutter, trim selvedge, and then cut 2" strips from (removed) selvedge to selvedge.
After you are done you will have a rainbow of fabrics. You should have 12, 2" strips of each color, approximately 41", depending on selvedge size removed. This will make 6 rainbows.
Match up pairs of strips, wrong sides together. Sew them together, with right sides of different colors touching. (An example stack of 4 fabrics would be red right side down, red right side up, orange right side down, orange right side up.) Use a 1/2" seam allowance. It is easy to do but hard to put into words! Basically the top and bottom layer of your quilt will be exposed, and you are sewing the seams so they all face upward.
I did all the red/orange together, then yellow/green, and finally blue/purple. Make sure to put the first color on top each time, for example yellow of yellow/green. You will have some length discrepancies, depending on the fabric and selvedge, but this will put them all on one end of the quilt, and it will be easier to even up later.
Finished strip pairs.
Next, lay out the red/orange and yellow/greens, with both seams sticking straight up.
Pinch the orange and yellow together, making sure to keep the seam upward. Pin and sew orange/yellow together. Repeat with all six sets. Next add the blue and purple.
One of six completed rainbows. Now sew the rainbows to each other.
Almost done with the sewing part! The bottom corner is what the bottom of the quilt looks like; nice and smooth. The top shows the seams that will be clipped and ragged.
Use your rotary supplies to even up the quilt. I had quite a lot of size differences between the different colors. The green, in particular, was a lot shorter than the other five.
Give the scraps you cut off to your kid for a kitty tail.
Now you need to top stitch around the perimeter of your quilt, still using a 1/2" seam allowance. I just held each seam down before I went over it to make a smooth surface.
Now clip, clip, clip! It feels like you are almost done, but this is actually the most labor intensive part. You could use scissors, but I HIGHLY recommend getting ragging shears. They are extra sharp, and have a spring so they bounce back after each snip.
Snip about every 1/4 inch, close to the seam, but don't snip through it. On each row first snip next to the perimeter seam on each end, so that you can fold it over flat to snip easier.
This is the top clipped, but not yet washed.
And the smooth back of the quilt. (Note, the green really is the same size as the other colors, but it looks smaller on the front. I think the yellow is just a bully color and pushes it over.)
Now toss it in the washer! Since you didn't prewash, be sure to throw in a color catcher sheet. (They are sold near the dryer sheets at any store.) This will catch any colors that bleed. I usually put just a tiny bit of soap in, and wash it on warm.
After the wash, but before the dryer, take it outside and shake as much of the loose frays off as you can. Then into the dryer. Check it every 5 or 10 minutes, because the lint trap will keep filling up. Repeat the wash and dry at least one more time. It will keep fluffing up every wash, but the majority will happen in the first two washes.
