Stacked Coins

When I was done creating the Diamonds quilt, I had a lot of oddly shaped scraps and remnants. Rather than trying to file them back into my stash that way, I decided to use some of it immediately.

There is a traditional quilt design called “Roman Coins” or “Chinese Coins.” As simple as they are, I’ve always wanted to make one. It is a strip quilt (I love them!) that uses stacked “coins” in alternating strips. The coins are simply narrow bands of color.

Stacked Coins. 65.5″ x 72.5″. August 2016. Photo by Jim Ruebush.

To make my pieced strips, I cut patches from the oddly sized scraps from the Diamonds quilt. When I depleted those, I also cut a bit from stash. Each patch was cut 2″ x 6.5″, but the size doesn’t matter a lot. They don’t even need to be the same, as long as each long, pieced strip is the same length. You can make a quilt like this as a mini or wall-hanging, or you can make it to go on a bed, or somewhere in between.

One thing that does matter is the distribution of colors. The majority of coins are purples and turquoises. I made sure to include at least one orange or green in each stack of four coins, in order to brighten it. Other than that I didn’t work very hard at arrangement.

Originally I planned to use the turquoise as sashings and outer borders, but once I opened the piece (from stash) I realized it wouldn’t be enough. Plan B was to use it for sashings and a narrow inner border. The same raspberry color used in the Diamonds quilt was used for the wider border. I don’t know how wide any of those are, off the top of my head. I could measure it, but … it doesn’t matter. Seriously, this is a quilt you can decide all these things based on what you have available, and it will look great.

You might notice how the narrow border and outside border are arranged. For the top and bottom, I stitched them together for the full width, before attaching to the body of the quilt. It’s not suitable for every quilt but I like the effect on this one.

This is one of the four quilts I finished in August. September has other things going on, so it was nice to finish a few things. (And if I am slow in responding to your comments, have patience! I’ll check in as soon as I can!)