The Jar Quilting Block

The Jar quilting block is another easy, fun and frugal quilt block to make. 

You can put anything you want in the jars.  The most popular items are  food or bugs.  Kids like the bug jars. Women often make wall hangings for their kitchen from the food jar blocks.

It can be a lot of fun collecting the different fabrics for your project.  Sometimes you can find a set of precut fabrics on ebay.  You only need one large square for the center featured fabric. 

You can make the jars any size you like.  I've seen them in many shapes. It is not hard to design your own shape once you see how this jar is put together.

You can see the pieces you need to cut from the picture of the block at the left.  This block does not have a grid.  The lines are just to illustrate the pieces you need.

I'm going to take you through the pictured  block step-by-step so you don't get confused. 

The block finishes at 6 1/2 inches.  The apple fabric piece in the middle needs to be 4 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches raw.

As you can see from the picture, I've chosen to use black as the background fabric.  Many people like to use black, because it makes the jars more prominent.

I also chose a metallic print for the lids.  You cannot see it in the picture, but it has a lot of texture, and is very shiny.

After you cut the middle block, the first thing you want to do is to round out the corners.  This is done with the snowball technique.  For this block  cut 4  1x1 inch raw squares.  Put them in the corners, sew the diagonal seam, and flip them over and trim off the excess fabric.

The lid is cut at 1 1/8 x 3 inches raw.  The horizontal pieces on each side of the lid are cut at
1 1/8 x 2 1/4 inch raw.  Go ahead and sew the horizontal pieces to each side of the lid.

Cut the black rectangle for the top of the lid at 1 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches raw.  Then sew it to the lid piece.

Next cut the vertical pieces that go on both sides of the jar.  Cut them at 1 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches raw.  Then sew them to each side of the jar.

All that remains is to cut the rectangle for the bottom piece and attach it to the block.  It is cut at 7/8 x 6 1/2 inches raw.

You may be tempted to round out some of the measurements, but do not do it if you want to keep the block a perfect square.   The measurements have been calculated so that the block finishes square. 

Since this block finishes at 6 1/2 inches,  it matches up with blocks that use  simple measurements. 

Have some fun with this one.  There are lots of novelty quilts out there, and lots of fun fabric.  You might also want to make a sampler quilt with this block.