Tile-lattice quilt tops look like the sort of thing that demands careful template piecing, and that is the barrier this project gets around. Brita Nelson the Questioning Quilter found a way to reach a Moroccan tile look starting from ordinary charm squares. The finished quilt shows interlocking star and tile shapes in the lighter fabric surrounded by multicolored patterned patches arranged in a grid. The construction begins simply enough: 72 dark five-inch charm squares, cut from scraps, paired with 72 white charms. Those become 144 half square triangle blocks trimmed to four and a half inches, which then form 36 finished blocks measuring seven inches. Once arranged into an hourglass shape, each block receives four cuts made one and three-eighths inches from the center seam, dividing it into nine sub-blocks. The four corner squares are rotated 180 degrees before everything is sewn back together, and four completed blocks join to form a single larger tile motif. A few choices stand out to me. The clear acrylic ruler marked with tape sits alongside a rotary cutter, a pressing mat, and a rotary cutting board, a sensible and approachable toolkit. Digital mockups were used to preview alternative colorways, and joining multiple motifs creates a secondary tile pattern that runs across the whole quilt top. The maker's website also offers a chart of sizes and cutting instructions for other block sizes, a generous extra in my view. One trade-off worth knowing about: an earlier layout placed light fabric in the upper left, dark fabric in the lower right, and medium fabric along the sides, and that version gave no three-dimensional effect on the tiles, though they still looked good. The maker also believes a small diamond at each tile's center would spoil the illusion. And a suggestion of three shades of one color set against three shades of its pale counterpart has not been tested yet.
Project by Brita Nelson the Questioning Quilter. Watch it on their YouTube channel: