The Heart Block- A Quilted Valentine (and free pattern)

I had a spur of the moment idea to make quilted Valentines this year! I just happened to have scraps on my desk that said Valentine’s Day to me, so I decided to strip piece them and make them into hearts!

I started to make them just as improv piecing, no pattern. It worked, but it was taking longer than I wanted to to make it all fit together. I also wanted a heart pattern without it being pieced down the middle. So then I decided to make a quick and easy paper piecing pattern. You can download it here for free for at least this month. Maybe longer!

The blocks are 11×11 inches if you use the pattern, but you can also make them larger. I added more width and height to some of them!

You can make these with single pieces of fabric as well. but like I mentioned, I had scraps ready to go. I stripe pieced everything then used it as a single piece of fabric! The pattern doesn’t have paper piecing instructions, but I do have a tutorial here and there are about a million and sixty-three tutorials online. Pick your favorite and sew away!

Like I said, I used scraps… I’m really excited about this! Between the hearts and the quilt top in the background, I’ve used almost all of my red, pink, orange and yellow solids scraps!

This is all I have left!

I went for improv quilting. Surprise, surprise, I know! I quilted in pink and did the heart first. Random back and forth straight-line quilting.

And then went back and did the outside quilting in yellow.

And you can imagine how excited I was when I looked in my binding scrape bucket, I have a bunch of options to choose from. Most of them were just long enough since these mini quilts are so small!

I finished them off with leather hangers. One of my Christmas presents was a leather belt hole punch and it worked great on these! I think it makes these little guys just a little more modern.

And the backs! Get ready for it… More scraps! The back of these continue to use scraps! This time I used cast offs from cutting the triangle shapes from the hearts.

This one is my favorite! I’m in love with this quilt back!

I didn’t add labels to these because I love the backs so much, I thought they could be reversible mini quilts. The labels I have would overwhelm the mini and i didn’t want to take away from the cool scrap piecing!

I hope you enjoy making a cute mini Valentine for yourself or a friend. You may think it’s too late to do this… It’s not! They are a quick sew (especially if you don’t strip piece first!) and you can make a few between now and then!