The Luna QAL — Cutting Your Background Fabric

This is probably not going to be your favorite week of the quiltalong, but we can't really make the quilt without background fabric so let's power through! You can cut your fabric for your quilt from yardage or you can cut it from scraps — I am going to use yardage for my jelly roll quilt and scraps for my scrappy quilt.

Usually in my patterns, I will give you the number of width of fabric (sometimes referred to as WOF) strips to cut from your yardage and then the number of pieces that you need to sub-cut from those pieces, but I didn't to that in this pattern for a couple of reasons having to do with space constraints, taking into account personal preference, and also the potential of dealing with directional fabrics.

But don't worry, I'm going to give you instructions some guidance here!

I prefer to cut my WOF strips the size of the longer measurement if it isn't an inefficient use of fabric. That means that instead of cutting a bunch of 2 1/2" strips, I am going to cut a 10 1/2" strip and then cut it into 2 1/2" pieces. When you do this, you can get 16 of the 2 1/2" pieces from each strip.

Cutting Your Background Fabric - The Luna QAL

That means for the baby size, you will need 1 strip of each size. For the lap size, you need 2 strips of each size. For the twin and queen size, you would need 4 and 5 strips respectively but it is not as fabric efficient for these sizes so you will need a little more yardage than is called for in the pattern.

For the larger quilt sizes, cut 2 1/2" strips from your full amount of yardage. Then sub-cut your pieces, starting with the largest sizes first — that way, you make sure to get your larger pieces cut and you can cut the smaller pieces from the leftovers.