BLOG

I love to quilt.

I hope that’s obvious 🙂 but sometimes it’s good to be explicit.

I also love cheater quilts!

I’ve been adding a lot of new cheater quilt fabric to my shop lately, and I’ve received a couple of emails from people asking if I have any posts about working with this kind of fabric.

That made me realize I don’t!

I’ve posted works-in-progress on social media, and written about it in newsletters, but I didn’t have a single comprehensive post here.

Time to fix that!

What Is Cheater Quilt Fabric?

When you make a cheater quilt, you aren’t piecing the quilt top. (That’s the “cheat.”) You’re using fabric that has a quilt already printed on it, like this.

You layer that fabric with batting and backing and then quilt it and – boom! – you have a cheater quilt.

So a cheater quilt is basically a very specific kind of whole cloth quilt.

Why Cheater Quilts?

In addition to being fast – cheater prints are also the least expensive way to make a quilt. No waste! Nothing lost to seam allowance!

As an example – here’s the fabric for a cheater quilt I made a few years ago. It’s 2 yards of the Monster Monster Cheater Quilt print on organic cotton sateen, so the printed size (not including the strips of white along the selvedge) is 56 inches wide and 72 inches tall.  

A comparable size quilt top made with any of my patterns would use about 6 yards of 42-inch wide fabric. Even factoring in the different fabric widths – that’s still more than twice as much fabric!

So cheaters are faster and less expensive.

Different Kinds of Cheater Fabrics

If you look at those two prints I’ve shown, you’ll see they’re a little different.

The Woodland Critters print you see in the first photo is a classic cheater quilt fabric. It’s laid out in squares just like a real quilt. I took mine a step further and actually photographed real quilt blocks, so you can see all my quilting and outline stitches too. Here’s a close-up of the Farm Animals cheater fabric so you can see.

Most cheater fabric doesn’t take it that far. 😂 But I kind of love the tiny imperfections that get included this way. If you look closely at the curve of quilting right next to the pig’s cheek you can see that I went a little off the darker blue line when I quilted that block. It still has a made-by-human-hands feel. 🥰

Not all of my cheater fabrics are made with my quilt actual blocks, but I’m adding more all the time and the description will always make it clear.

The Monster Monster print you see in the video snippet is quilt-ish. It’s not laid out in a grid of square blocks, but they’re square-ish and they’re in a grid layout – but it’s a wonky grid. This has quilt vibes without actually looking like a “proper” quilt.

I also have some fabrics in the Cheater Quilts section of my shop that aren’t cheater quilts in the strictest sense, because their layout isn’t like a quilt. They’re just large-scale prints that work really well for whole-cloth quilts, so I group them in with the cheaters because it’s the same concept. You’ll see an example of this in the next section.

How to Finish a Cheater Quilt

When you make a cheater quilt, the “cheating” is in how you make the top. You still have to quilt the layers together. I like to hand quilt my cheaters using Big Stitch Quilting – but you can also machine quilt, or tie, or finish it any way you like.

Some people say it’s a “waste of time and effort” to hand quilt a cheater quilt. To them I say, “Pfui! It’s my fabric, my thread, my hands, my time. I can do whatever I want.”

Here’s an example of a quilt in progress using my Meadow print in blue and yellow…

And here’s that finished quilt after washing so it has all the awesome crinkle.

When I hand-quilt my cheaters, I just pin-baste the layers together and then do big stitch quilting around each shape. This, to me, is as relaxing as coloring. In fact, I think of it as coloring in slow motion. With a needle and thread, of course. 😁

I don’t need to make any decisions so there’s zero pressure. I just choose a thread color that kind of matches the shape I’m outlining, and then it’s endless running stitches – the easiest stitch there is. I love the little sound the eye of the needle makes when it pops through the fabric, followed by the soft hiss of the thread as I pull it through. I love the feel of the fabric and thread in my hands, and the play of light on the surface. No thinking, just enjoying the moment and the repetition of thousands of stitches, filling the surface of the fabric with texture. It’s as close as I get to meditation.

Here’s an example of one of the “blocks” of the Monster Monster print.

You can see that I also quilted some of the purple block behind him, and every other white stripe in the gray background.

One thing I learned from this particular project is that minky and hand-quilting don’t go well together. 🙁 If you look closely you can see lots of dark purple specks in those white stripes. That was the pile of the minky getting pulled through to the front of the quilt. 🙁 I’ve machine quilted lots of minky- and cuddle-backed quilts with no problem, so I think it was just the hand-stitching that caused the problem.

How to Make a Cheater Quilt

Here are links to all the tutorials you’ll need.

• Order your fabric. You can find all my cheater prints here. I recommend printing on organic cotton sateen. That’s the fabric base I’ve used for all my cheaters and I love how vibrant the colors print – and how vibrant they remain after lots and lots of washes. Two yards makes a nice couch-sized quilt. If you want to make a big bed-sized quilt, Spoonflower now has extra-wide cotton sateen.
• Don’t forget to order backing and binding, too! Most of my cheater fabrics have links to coordinating prints to make that easy.
• Layer and baste your quilt sandwich. My favorite batting is Warm & Natural. I wrote a review of it here.
• Here’s a list (with links to sources) of all my favorite tools and supplies, including my favorite batting, and thread and that square Q-snap frame you see in a lot of photos.
• Quilt your quilt.
  • There’s a video here showing how I do Big Stitch Quilting. I really like using Sulky Petites 12 wt. thread for this kind of stitching. It comes in loads of great colors, doesn’t need separating, and comes on neat and tidy little spools. I review the thread here.
  • If you want to machine quilt your layers together, there’s a video here showing how to machine quilt. This post has extra tips for machine quilting a big quilt on a standard sewing machine. And this post has one of my favorite tips for machine quilting without swearing. 😂
  • If you want to do traditional hand quilting, there’s a tutorial here.
  • You can also tie your quilt, but I don’t have a tutorial for that.
• After you stitch the entire surface, you just need to bind your quilt. There’s a video showing my favorite method here.

Happy stitching!