My friend, Colleen, made several Potato Chip quilts for charity, and then got the idea to make a one block quilt — a giant Potato Chip block. She cut the rectangles 6 1/2″ x 12 1/2.” Using tone-on-tone and floral fat quarters of blue, yellow, and green, she made a lap quilt for her sister-in-law. She quilted various designs in the rectangles and bound it in cheerful yellow.
And then Colleen challenged me to make a quilt with one giant Potato Chip block.
Challenge accepted! I surmised that I could cut six 5 1/2″ x 10 1/2″ rectangles from a fat quarter. Six fat quarters would yield thrity-six rectangles, four more than the thirty-two required by Colleen’s design. But then I decided to replace the two rectangles in the center with an 8 1/2″ orphan Pinwheel block which I framed to bring the block size to 10 1/2.” Desiring to make a blend-y quilt, I selected coordinating fabrics from my green bin and my Civil War repro bin. I also wanted to use a medium-light large scale plaid gifted by my daughter-in-law, but it was lighter in value than the greens and tans and would therefore draw attention to itself if included in the line-up of rectangles. As an alternative, I decided to use it as borders rather than cut it into rectangles.
To make the measurements compatible with the central patchwork, I cut the plaid border strips 5 1/2″ x 20 1/2″ and cut 5 1/2″ tan corner squares. Then followed a border made of rectangles and another border of the plaid fabric. My quilt is 42″ square, a great size for giving a veteran at the VA hospital.
So there you have it — Variation on a Potato Chip.
For more variations, look at the Quilting Board website. Here’s the link to the Forum thread on Potato Chip Quilt. Scroll down through several comments, stopping on dluvs2quilt. She posted a link to the Sarnia Quilters Guild’s 33 page pdf of Potato Chip layouts. If you click the link, it automatically downloads to your computer.