To start off I thought I'd post the easiest quilt I've made so far, and that's because the quilt top is all one piece! After experimenting with lots of block styles and shapes I wanted to get one finished quilt made up in only a couple days, and voilà! It really is perfect for crafters with little time and want fast results. Featuring fabric designed and printed to look like patchwork or appliqué, a cheater quilt allows you to skip the huge task of doing piecework on a quilt. All you have to do is quilt and bind.
This is perfect for beginners as it really frees up your free time to practicing your sewing skills and its size and lack of hundreds of seams makes it perfect for rolling under your machine without it being too bulky and fiddly. You can also practice following characteristics of the design with different stitch styles without having to stitch in the ditch (where you sew a simple running stitch so that it hits the middle point between two seams continuously). I guess you can practice with different stitches (whatever your machine allows) to traverse this fiddly job, perhaps with the wider satin stitch but the point is to make the seams as subtle as possible and let the design of the blocks speak for themselves.
Also, this design is aided by a good quality batting or thermal sandwich layer. I used a 80/20% cotton/polyester machine punched batting for the filling of my quilt which grips the fibres of the cotton top and bottom fabric layers really well so I didn't have to worry about saturating the quilt with lots of stitch lines. As long as the stitches are less than 6" apart it fuses pretty darn well. You want to be careful to get batting which is more tightly packed then most types of interfacing. Its less lofty and won't compact down to nothing after a few washes. Especially for baby quilts, these things get thrown about and washed a lot!
