A Shortcut for Making Scrappy Four-Patches

Skip Cutting Little Pieces, Whether Scrappy or Not!

Four-patches are found in many quilts and quilt blocks. They probably are used as often as the ever popular nine-patch.

Making them the traditional way requires cutting four squares and stitching them together. However, there’s a simpler way that, unlike strip piecing, allows each four-patch to be different.

Lori Holt from Bee in My Bonnet as written an excellent tutorial. This is part of a sew along so it assumes you already have cutting instructions. Don’t worry about that, as four-patches can be made to any size using her construction method.

Click here for Lori’s Four-Patch tutorial.

Jenny from Missouri Star Quilt Co. demonstrates the same process in the following video. She starts with 5″ charm squares.

Click here to watch the video at YouTube if it doesn’t play on your device.

Part of the beauty of this method, besides being faster, is that each four-patch can be different for a scrappy look. Or, make them all the same if the pattern calls for it.

Plus, it’s simple to do and a real time saver.

To create four-patches of a specific size, take the size of the finished block and add 1 ” to each dimension. So for a finished four-patch that’s 4″ square, start with 5″ squares.