Motel #4

01What you’re making

This is a picture rather than a pattern, and that changes how it is built. The wallpaper and the floor are each an ordinary repeating quilt design, pieced flat in blocks exactly as you would piece any quilt. What makes it a room is what happens next: both panels are cut along the lines of the walls and the floor, joined with white strips, and then a bed and three empty pictures are laid over the top.

02How the painting is put together

The first thing worth knowing is something the painting does quietly, and it is the reason this quilt is possible at all. The room is drawn in perspective. The patterns are not.

The ceiling line, the skirting board and the corner all behave like a real room seen from one side: they converge, and if you extend them they meet at two vanishing points sitting on a single horizon. But the wallpaper laid over that room never changes size. Its squares measure the same across the whole painting, from the corner to the right-hand edge. Had Erin drawn the wallpaper receding with the room, its squares would have grown by a factor of 3.06 across the right-hand wall, and no flat panel of piecing could reproduce it.

This is what makes the quilt buildable. The wallpaper is a flat repeating pattern. The floor is a flat repeating pattern. The room is the shape they are cut into.

Wallpaper block — 6 × 6 units, 9″ finished. Make 51.

Floor tile — 4 × 4 units, 6″ finished. Make 61.

Four wallpaper blocks together. Half the shapes only appear once the blocks meet.

Four floor tiles together. The green and teal frames run into diagonal ribbons.

Only three kinds of piece

That is the whole vocabulary. A plain square. A triangle unit — two triangles joined on the diagonal, what quilters call a half-square triangle. And an hourglass unit — four triangles, a quarter-square triangle, which is just two triangle units cut apart again the other way.

03Size, and the one formula

One decision sets every other measurement: how big each small square finishes. The whole quilt is 54 squares across and 43 down, so everything follows from that number.

The rest of this pattern uses 1½″, which gives 81″ × 64½″ — big enough to read as a picture across a room, small enough that the piecing stays sane. It also puts the cut sizes exactly where they are on Pattern, so if you have made that one, none of the cutting will be new.

04Fabric and shopping list

Use quilting-weight cotton. Four colours do all of the pattern; a fifth — plain white or a soft cream — does the room’s lines, the bed and the pictures. These were read straight off the painting; match them by eye at the shop and don’t agonise over exact shades.

Yardages assume 40″ of usable width once selvedges are trimmed, and include about 15% margin. Teal and green take the most because hourglass units are hungry: a 2¾″ square of each makes only two finished 1½″ units.

Also on the list

05Tools and setting up

06Cutting

Cut in strips across the width of the fabric, then cut the strips into squares. Keep the three sizes firmly apart — 2″, 2⅜″ and 2¾″ are close enough to confuse and different enough to ruin a block.

These are the squares you cut. The triangle and hourglass squares get sewn and cut apart into finished units in section 8 — one pair of 2⅜″ squares makes two triangle units, one pair of 2¾″ squares makes two hourglass units.

Or, one block at a time

If you would rather cut as you go:

07Make one of each before you cut everything

08Triangle units and hourglass units

Triangle units, two at a time

1. Stack a pair right sides together, edges matched — one square of each fabric, cut 2⅜″.
2. Draw the diagonal corner to corner on the back of the lighter square.
3. Stitch a scant ¼″ away from the line, on both sides. Not on the line — either side of it.
4. Cut along the drawn line. Two units.
5. Press the seam open, then trim each unit to exactly 2″ square, keeping the 45° line of your ruler on the seam.

Hourglass units, two at a time

An hourglass unit is a triangle unit that has been cut apart a second time, the other way. All 816 of them in this quilt are the same pairing — teal and green — so this is one long batch.

1. Pair a teal and a green square, both cut 2¾″.
2. Make two triangle units from them exactly as above — but do not trim them.
3. Stack the two units right sides together with teal facing green, so the two diagonal seams sit directly on top of one another and nest.
4. Draw the other diagonal across the top, stitch a scant ¼″ either side of it, and cut on the line.
5. Press open and trim to 2″ square, keeping the centre of the ruler exactly on the point where the four triangles meet.

09Piecing the wallpaper blocks

51 identical blocks, 6 × 6 units each. Work in rows, like reading a page, and lay all 36 units out before a single seam goes in.

What goes where

Each swatch below is drawn at the orientation the unit is actually sewn. For the hourglass units the picture is the instruction — turn the unit until it matches.

1. Sew each row of 6 units, left to right, chain-piecing rather than fetching pieces one at a time.
2. Press the row seams. Odd rows to the right, even rows to the left, so that when two rows meet their seams fall opposite ways and lock against each other.
3. Join the rows top to bottom, pinning at each nested seam. Press these long seams open.
4. Measure. 9½″ square. Set it aside and start the next.

The block reads the same forwards and backwards along every row. If one doesn’t, a unit is turned the wrong way.

10Piecing the floor tiles

61 identical tiles, 4 × 4 units each. Simpler than the wallpaper: ten plain squares, two teal-and-green triangle units at opposite corners, and four navy-and-pink triangle units that make the hourglass in the middle.

1. Make the middle first. Four navy-and-pink triangle units, arranged with all four navy points meeting at the centre, make the two-square hourglass. Sew them into a four-patch and check the point.
2. Sew rows 1 and 4 — the plain edges with a triangle unit at one end.
3. Add the side squares to the middle four-patch, then sew the top and bottom rows on.
4. Measure. 6½″ square.

The two teal-and-green triangle units sit at the top left and the bottom right, both with the green on the upper right of the diagonal. Get one of them the wrong way round and the diagonal ribbons across the floor break.

11Joining the blocks into two panels

Now build the two panels. Neither is a plain rectangle — you only make the blocks that show — so this is where the map earns its keep.

2,812 units get pieced for a quilt that finishes at 2,322 squares — 21.1% over. That is the cost of cutting a picture out of a pattern: every block along a diagonal is made whole and then trimmed. The offcuts are large, clean, and already pieced; a pair of them makes a cushion front, and the biggest would back a small quilt.

12Cutting the room

The room is four straight lines: the ceiling on each side of the corner, and the skirting board on each side of it. Each is marked, cut, and then a white strip is sewn in along it.

Marking

Work on a big flat surface with the panel pressed and square. Measure from the top left corner of the quilt in every case — errors that accumulate along an edge will throw the corner out.

Mark the finished line. You will cut ¼″ outside it, on the side that keeps the fabric, so the seam allowance is there when the white strip goes on.

Cutting

1. Starch the panel along the line, generously, and press it dry. Starch is what stops a bias edge behaving like elastic. Do not skip it.
2. Stay-stitch a line of ordinary machine stitching about ⅛″ outside your cutting line, through the pieced panel. This holds every little seam the cut is about to cross.
3. Cut with a long ruler and a fresh blade, in one pass, ¼″ outside the marked finished line.
4. Handle the cut edge as little as possible from now on. Carry the panel flat; don’t let it hang.

Putting the room together

The white strips are cut 2″ wide — 1½″ finished — and long enough to run past both ends of each line, which is easier than trying to cut them to length. You need about 138″ of strip in total.

1. Ceiling first. Sew a white strip to the top edge of the wall panel along each of the two ceiling lines, mitring where they meet at the corner. Press towards the strip.
2. Add the ceiling. One green triangle, 35¾″ along the top edge of the quilt and 3¾″ deep at the corner, cut with a ¼″ seam allowance all round. Sew it to the other side of the white strips.
3. Skirting board. Sew a white strip along the bottom edge of the wall panel, again mitring at the corner, and press towards the strip.
4. Join the floor. Pin the floor panel to the free edge of that strip, matching the corner first and then easing along each side. Sew, press, and check the whole thing lies flat.
5. Square the quilt to 81″ × 64½″, trimming the outer edges.

Why mitre rather than butt. The two ceiling lines meet at the corner at an angle, and so do the two skirting lines. A mitred join puts a single clean point there. Butting one strip against the other leaves a step, and the corner of the room is the first place the eye goes.

13The bed and the pictures

Four shapes in white, laid on top of the finished room. In the painting they are simply unpainted paper — no shading, no detail — and the quilt should be the same: flat white, with the folds suggested by quilting later rather than by piecing now.

The three pictures

None of them is a rectangle — they hang on walls drawn in perspective, so each is a quadrilateral with four different corners. Cut them from the table above, adding ½″ all round if you are turning the edges under.

1. Cut the shape to the four corners given, plus your turning allowance.
2. Position it using the measurements from the top left corner of the quilt, and pin or press it into place.
3. Applique it down — by hand with a blind stitch, or by machine with a narrow zigzag or a blanket stitch in matching thread.
4. Mark the inner line. The painting draws a thin pencil rectangle inside each picture, about ¼″ in from the edge. Quilt it in later rather than piecing or drawing it.

The bed

The easiest way to get this shape full size is to draw it on the quilt itself. Chalk the grid lines — they are the block seams you have already sewn, so most of them are there — and copy the outline square by square from the diagram. It does not need to be exact; it is a rumpled bedspread, and a slightly different rumple is still a bedspread.

1. Cut the bed from white, adding ½″ all round.
2. Place it with its top left corner 23⅞″ from the left edge of the quilt and 34″ from the top.
3. Applique it down. Take particular care along the top edge, where it crosses the skirting board — that seam is already bulky and the bed needs to lie flat over it.
4. Trim away the back. Once it is stitched, cut the pieced panel out from behind the bed, leaving ¼″ inside the stitching line. It is the largest applique in the quilt and it will be much easier to quilt without four layers under it.

14Backing, batting and basting

The backing

You need a backing about 89″ × 72½″ — 4″ bigger than the quilt on every side.

• Extra-wide backing fabric (2½ yd) needs no piecing at all.
• Normal-width fabric (6¼ yd) means joining 3 panels. Trim the selvedges off first, join with ½″ seams, and press those seams open.

Basting

1. Backing down first, wrong side up. Smooth it flat and tape the edges down — taut, but not stretched.
2. Batting on top, smoothed from the centre outwards.
3. Quilt top on last, right side up, centred, smoothed from the middle.
4. Baste with safety pins every 3–4″, or with basting spray. Work from the centre out.

Pin generously along the two diagonal seams. They are the only bias seams in the quilt and they are the most likely to shift while you work.

15Quilting

This top has two busy patterns and four big blank shapes, and that split is worth using rather than ignoring. The usual advice — quilt it all the same — makes the bed look like a hole.

• On the wallpaper and the floor, keep it structural and quiet. Straight lines in the ditch along the block seams, or diagonals through the hourglasses, both disappear into the piecing and hold the layers.
• On the bed, do the opposite: this is where the quilting draws. Long curved lines following the folds of the bedspread, close together, will make it read as cloth rather than as a white gap. The painting’s own pencil lines show where the folds fall.
• On the pictures, quilt the inner rectangle about ¼″ in from the edge, and leave the middle empty. That is exactly what the painting does.
• On the ceiling, whatever you like — it is a small triangle.

Start in the middle and work outwards, so any excess is pushed to the edges rather than trapped in the centre. Don’t leave any area larger than about 4–6″ unquilted, or check what your batting’s packet specifies.

16Binding

You need about 291″ of binding, so cut 8 strips 2½″ wide.

1. Trim the quilt square, cutting the batting and backing flush with the top.
2. Join the strips end to end with diagonal seams; press those open. Press the whole length in half lengthwise, wrong sides together.
3. Sew it to the front with a ¼″ seam, raw edges together, starting partway along one side and leaving a tail of about 10″ loose.
4. Mitre the corners: stop ¼″ from each corner, backstitch, fold the binding straight up away from the quilt to make a 45° fold, then fold it back down level with the next edge.
5. Join the two ends where they meet — overlap by exactly the width of your binding, trim, and seam them diagonally.
6. Turn the binding to the back and stitch it down, covering the line of machine stitching.

17Label, and looking after it

Put a label on it. A scrap of the backing fabric, hemmed and stitched to a back corner, with the maker’s name, the date, and a line about where the design came from — the painting, its title, and Erin’s name. In fifty years that label will be the most valuable part of the quilt.

Hanging it. This one is a picture, and pictures want a wall. A hanging sleeve — a 4″ tube of backing fabric, hemmed at both ends and slip-stitched along the top edge on the back — takes a batten and keeps the weight off the binding. Sew it on before the binding is turned and it hides completely.

Washing. Cold water, gentle cycle, mild detergent. Colour-catcher sheets for the first few washes — there is a lot of navy against a lot of white. Dry flat or on a line.

18When something goes wrong

My hourglass units have blunt points in the middle.

Either they weren’t trimmed with the ruler’s centre exactly on the crossing point, or the second cut wandered off the drawn line. There should be a full ¼″ of fabric beyond the centre point on every side before it meets the next seam.

The cut edge has stretched and now waves.

Bias. Starch it hard, press it dry without sliding the iron, and ease the extra length in as you pin the white strip on — pin at both ends and the middle first, then halve the gaps. If it is badly out, a line of stay-stitching pulled up very slightly will draw it back.

The corner of the room doesn’t meet in a point.

The two white strips need mitring, not butting. Unpick back a few inches either side, fold each strip at 45°, press the fold, and stitch along it.

The floor panel is longer than the wall panel along the skirting board.

One of them has stretched on the diagonal, or the room lines were marked from different edges. Measure both cut edges: the true length is the one that matches the table in section 12. Ease the longer one in rather than trimming — trimming moves the line.

The bed puckers where it crosses the skirting board.

That seam has three or four layers under it. Press it as flat as it will go before appliqueing, and consider trimming the seam allowances down within the bed’s outline before you stitch it over them.

I’ve run out of one fabric.

Teal and green go furthest — they are in every hourglass. If you are short, substitute in the floor tiles rather than the wallpaper: the floor has fewer, larger pieces and a slight shift there reads as light on a floor rather than as a mistake.

19Glossary

Finished vs unfinished

Finished is the size a piece ends up once it’s sewn in on all sides; unfinished is its size while it’s still loose. A 1½″ finished square is a 2″ unfinished one.

Scant ¼″

A seam a thread or two under a quarter inch, allowing for the fabric taken up when the seam is pressed over.

Half-square triangle (HST)

A square made of two triangles joined on the diagonal. Called a “triangle unit” throughout this pattern.

Quarter-square triangle (QST)

A square made of four triangles meeting at the centre. Called an “hourglass unit” here.

Bias

Any line at 45° to the weave. Bias edges stretch; straight-grain edges don’t. Every cut in section 12 crosses the grain at an angle, which is why they all get starched.

Stay-stitching

A line of ordinary stitching sewn just outside a cutting line to stop the seams it crosses from opening up.

Applique

A shape laid on top of a finished background and stitched down, rather than pieced into it.

Mitre

A join made at 45°, so two strips meeting at a corner form a clean diagonal seam.

Nesting

Pressing two seams that will meet in opposite directions, so they lock together and the join lines up.

WOF

Width of fabric — a cut running selvedge to selvedge, about 40″ usable.

20How these numbers were worked out

Nothing here was estimated by eye. The painting was measured directly, and the design was drawn back out and compared against it.

• The room was found by fitting all four white lines at once from six numbers — a horizon, two vanishing points, the corner, and the height of the wall at the corner — so that they are forced to describe a real room rather than four independent lines. 336 points on those lines fit to 1.55 pixels rms, and the two vanishing points land on the same horizon to within 2 pixels.
• The patterns were tested for perspective by measuring their repeat in a sliding window across the whole painting. The wallpaper measures 33–37 pixels everywhere. If it followed the room it would grow 3.06× across the right-hand wall. It does not, so both patterns are flat.
• The wallpaper’s repeat was confirmed by shift-matching the map of cells against itself: cells agree 0.77 of the time six cells apart, against 0.2–0.4 at every other shift — and the agreement holds across the room’s corner, which is how we know the wall is one continuous flat panel and not two.
• Each block is a majority vote, pixel by pixel, across every repeat of it in the painting — 785 wallpaper cells and 25 floor tiles. That averaging is what recovers the intended design from a hand-painted one.
• The design was drawn back out at the painting’s own size and compared to it. 98% of the painting agrees on where the white is — the room’s lines, the pictures and the bed — and 68% of pixels get the same fabric, against a hand-painted original with a pencil line around every piece.

What was changed on purpose

Three regularisations, and they are the only places where the quilt departs from the painting:

Two further choices are judgement rather than measurement: the 1½″ finished square, and the decision to applique the bed and the pictures rather than piece them in. Both are easy to change.