How to Make a Barjo Quilt

If you don't quilt, this post will have zero interest for you; it's for a few friends in particular who asked.  Also, I am in no way one of those professional bloggers who posts gorgeous photos of each step-by-step instruction of the process.  I pulled out my iPhone and clicked away.  So, please excuse the non-professionalness of my quilt and my blog photos.  Haha.

A few months ago, I was working on quilting a Barjo baby quilt and showed it to a friend over Skype.  She asked me how to make it, and thus this post was inspired.  When I googled how to make a Barjo, I discovered that it seems to be more of a French technique, as all that came up on google was in French and I learned it in France.

I have a friend who asked me to make quilts for her kids, and sent me the fabric to do it.  While she sent plenty of fabric, there weren't any pieces large enough to be the back of the quilt.  After I'd finished the top, I kept looking at the stack of leftover fabric and thinking I should use it for the back. Waste not, want not, right?  I finally decided to make a bunch of Barjo squares, and while doing so, I took the photos for this post.  And voila! 

1.  Cut four pieces of fabric an identical size.  For the blue/brown/white Barjo above, my squares were 40 centimeters each.  For the boy quilt below, they were 16 inches each.  It's important that they're square and not rectangle.  You will lose a bit of size as you sew, so start a good deal bigger than you want your final square to be.  The blue/brown/white ended up being 33 centimeters finished, and the boy was somewhere between 12-14 inches (I can't remember exactly).

2.  Stack all four pieces face down, with your corners and edges perfectly lined up.

3.  Number your bottom right hand corners, 1-4.  (Top fabric is 1, next is 2, bottom is 4.)  Throughout the process, you will always keep the numbered corners on the bottom right, and in the same exact order.  They never change.

4.  If you have a rotary cutter, then place your large ruler diagonally on the fabric wherever you want, and cut through all four layers at the same time. (Rotary cutters, you can skip to step #7.)  If you don't have a rotary cutter, place your large ruler diagonally on the fabric wherever you want, and trace a line with a pen.

5.  Pin on both sides of the traced line, and do that 3-4 times down the line.

6.  Cut directly on the line through all four layers of fabric, and then remove your pins.

7.  This step is the important one.  Remember to always keep the numbered corners on the bottom right, and in the same exact order.  Pick up the top piece from your left (or unnumbered) stack and move it to the bottom of the stack.

8.  Your two stacks should still form a square, but have mismatched fabrics.

9.  Take the top fabric from the left and right stack, and place them right sides together, along the cut line, and pin.

10.  Sew with a 1/4 inch (or 1 centimeter) seam allowance.

11.  Press your seam open.  Having an open seam will help later with all the layers you end up creating.

12.  Monkeys and tractors.  That'd be a little scary if it happened in real life, don't you think?

13.  When finished, should have four large squares that are mix-and-matched of your fabrics.

14.  Place them face down, like before, and line up the four right corners with their numbers, just like when you started.

15.  This time, place your ruler anywhere you want on the square, as long as you aren't going parallel to the original seam that you cut and sewed.  (Sewed?  Sewn?  I'm losing my English.)  Cut through all four layers, like you did the first time.

16.  Take the top piece of the unnumbered pile, and move it to the bottom of the stack.  Your square should now look like this.

17.  Match up your seams to pack a perfect corner when you can.  (There will be a few times that they just won't match up at all.  It'll drive the perfectionist crazy but there are just some things in life that we have to accept will not be the way we want them.  Perfect corners in a Barjo is one of them.)

18.  Sew and press seams open, like before.  You should have four squares that look something like this.

19.  For your third cut, place the ruler wherever you want on the fabric, but never parallel to the other seams.  Cut and move your top unnumbered piece to the bottom of the stack.  Pin, sew, and press seams open.

20.  Your squares are now beginning to look all hodge-podgey.  It's so tempting to stop after the third cut, but you've got one more to go.  Hang in there.

21.  Repeat the whole process one more time.  Four pieces of fabric means four cuts.  You can do it.

22. When you've finished the fourth cut/flip/pin/sew/press step, you should have four squares that all have the same design but look different with the various fabrics.

23.  Measure all four squares to find the most narrow part of square, and then trim all four to that size.  For the blue quilt above, 33 centimeters was the most narrow, and that's how I ended up with such a random measurement.  But look how lovely it looks when trimmed!

24.  You can then put sashing in between your squares (as I did with the blue/white/brown quilt).  I made that small one in about two afternoons--it really does go that fast.  For the boy quilt, I had to make enough squares to make an entire twin sized backing, and so I made a bunch of Barjo squares.  I ended up making three different sized ones, (plus a few string squares to use up the strings I had left over), and then sewed (sewn?) all those together.  It was so big I couldn't get a picture of the whole thing, and since I was on my tippy toes, it came out blurry.

It's a little crazy looking, but at the same time, it's so scrappy and fully of bright energy, and that's how I imagine the little boy to whom it will belong.  It's possible that I like the back of his quilt even more than the front!

Anyway, the Barjo is a really easy technique that can allow you to get a lot made quickly.  It's a good one for beginners, as there is no exact measuring, and there are really only two mistakes you can make: forgetting to flip the top fabric to the bottom, (guilty on multiple occasions), and not pinning it the right way so that it makes a square when finished (guilty on multiple occasions).  But if you pay attention (and don't carry your fabrics around town with you so that you forgot what step you were on and thus pinned wrong), you should be fine.

Have fun!