Hacking the Pixel Quilt with Fusible Interfacing

I have personally made two quilts in my life. Both were pixel quilts, and I didn't use a single pin on either one. Here is a brief description of how I did it.

The quilt I will use for this blog is my Day of the Doctor quilt pattern. You can get the pattern here:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/747416075/day-of-the-doctor-pixel-craft-pattern?ref=shop_home_active_1

Doctor Who Pixel Quilt! (Or potential C2C!)

This quilt is 75 pixels wide and 95 pixels tall. For this quilt, I cut 1.5" squares. With a 1/4" seam allowance, each finished square was about an inch. Technically it would fit nicely on a twin size bed. But I use these pixel quilts as wall hangings.

To avoid the use of pins, I use the lightest weight fusible interfacing I could find. I think the one I used was called "featherweight" by Pellon. I bought yards of it during a sale at Joanns. The interfacing will only be used to hold the squares together until you get them sewn.

The first step was to cut a mountain of tiny squares:

Then I laid them out across the interfacing:

I could fit 13 rows of squares on each strip of my interfacing, with a tiny bit of interfacing left on the right edge. This part needs to be done very, very carefully. The straighter the rows are now, the better the seams will line up. To make this process easier, you could physically draw perfectly straight lines across the interfacing with a disappearing ink pen, or splurge and buy special quilter interfacing with a grid already drawn on. Or you can eyeball it and hope for the best, which I tried and failed at. So I don't recommend it.

After you lay the squares out, carefully press your iron across the entire surface. Do not move the iron, unless you want all the squares to shift around. Also, don't iron the exposed strip of interfacing left over. You will need that later, and you don't want the glue sticking to your iron.

Repeat this step for all the strips, and lay them out on the floor to make sure you followed the graph right. If you made a mistake, carefully peel off the offending squares and iron the right ones on. Once you are satisfied with the way everything looks, take one of the strips to the sewing machine.

Fold each row of squares back on the perfectly straight edge you have created. And sew all the way across. Over and over again, until all the rows have been sewn together. This is mindless sewing, so listen to an audiobook or podcast. Press the finished strip so that all of the seam allowances are pointing in the same direction.

Here is a picture of my quilt, halfway through sewing all the strips. Which I did out of order for some reason. You can tell which strips are sewn, because the image looks squashed. Also, I hadn't ironed the strips yet, which is why they are so sad looking- I waited and ironed them all at the same time.

Remember that bit of leftover interfacing at the bottom of each strip? Now that all the strips are done, we are going to use that bit to stick the strips to each other. Take the 1st and 2nd strips. Line up the squares, with the 2nd strip overlapping that exposed interfacing. And iron them together. Then you can fold the piece in half along the seamline and sew it together, just like you did before! If you prefer, you could also cut a strip of new interfacing and use that. Or, you can be inefficient and old-fashioned and pin the strips together.

Here is the quilt after the strips have been joined and ironed.

And here is the nicely ironed back.

Now, because you cut and lined up your squares so perfectly, you can fold along each vertical seam line and sew all the way down. Result: perfectly lined up, tiny squares without using any pins at all. Of course, iron the seams flat, and you have a totally awesome quilt top that looks very professional and impressive.

Bind and quilt using your preferred method. And then staple it to a wall and use it as a giant piece of home decor!