My first Cathedral Window quilt   

There is a version you can find in books and on the internet which is made completely by machine.   However this method seems to be twice as onerous as the hand version and you are no more likely to get good joins at the corner of the blocks either.  With any version of Cathedral Window where any flaw in folding and accuracy will show is the corner joins of the blocks (where I have placed appliqué circles).  And indeed if you look back at Cathedral Window quilts in history books quilters have been doing this for years.  There must be as many Cathedral Windows with dots as without!  Actually I think it adds to the entire design if you can be bothered, and if not buttons make a great substitute. 

 A pillow made by my friend Alison Toni, (http://casaqueltehue.net) the first she ever made and using buttons instead of appliqué circles. 

I have made one perfect Cathedal Window hanging where no disguise was needed but it took ages and personally I'd rather go for speed and dots.  

No dots needed here!

What you need to remember about Cathedral Window is that it uses A LOT of  background fabric and that ideally, as the quilt will get very heavy, it should be a lightweight cotton (or silk)  which you can iron with a very hot iron and which will give lovely sharp creases.  It isn't a quilt in the proper sense of the word as it is not layered, there is no batting, nor is there any quilting.  It's just a lot of folded fabric and a full sized bed quilt (which I dream of making one day) must weigh a ton.

For the footstool I cut squares of 7" for each unit.  With a 7" starting square you will end up with approximately a 3" finished unit.  

1.  Cut background squares of 7 ".  Fold the top to bottom, iron and then fold side to side and iron to get the centre and creases marked in a cross on the square. 

2.  Traditionally in both the hand and machine versions you now turn in and iron 1/4" on all four sides.  Usually it is suggested that you draw a line 1/4" in to use as a guide.  I find that turning in 1/4" neatly is nigh impossible and furthermore that it is fiddly and incredibly time consuming to draw lines and iron using them as a guide.   Instead I turn under a bigger 1/2 " on all sides and I have found that the fastest way to do this accurately is to cut a piece of cardboard exactly 1" smaller than my original cut square, place my fabric square (in this case 7") on the ironing board, place the card  (cut to 6") as centrally as I can on top and then holding the card in place I just iron the fabric over the card on all four sides.  Remove the card, quickly re-iron along the creases and there you have the perfect start relatively effortlessly.   

3.  Now iron up the four corners to the centre as shown.    With a matching thread hand-sew these four corners in place together.  Now iron the corners to the centre again but this time just leave the corners open - don't sew in place (which is what you would do now if you were making it entirely by hand).  Ideally you want these creases very sharp so use a very hot steam iron top and bottom.

4.  If you are making this for the first time and trying, for example, to make a pillow, I would start with a 6 x 6 blocks (i.e. 36 units in all) which if using my 7 " starting square as above will give you a 18" square pillow.   For this you will first join six blocks together in a row, sewing as shown below.

You will use the fold line as the line to sew on.    As you don't want lots of end threads in all the corners, I find it easier to start about a half and inch down, reverse stitch to the end, forward stitch to the other end and and then also reverse at the bottom so your threads won't end at the corners as shown above.   Trim threads.  Join all six blocks together in this way.  You will find that as the folds of the squares echo each other nicely that you won't need to pin, I have shown use of a pin here to clarify where you should be sewing.  

5.  For ease in these instructions we will assume that you will make all the base blocks first, i.e. sew all 36 blocks together, although actually you will discover you can join one or two rows, then do some hand stitching of the windows if you feel like some hand sewing and then add more strips afterwards as you can see I did with my footstool.  So let's pretend that you have made 6 strips of six blocks.

6.  Now you will need to join the strips together.  Pin two strips together matching the triangular tops and side seams as shown.   Sew this seam right across all the blocks, again using the fold line as a guide to where you should sew as shown in my footstool example below

7. When all strips are sewn it is time to anchor all those loose flaps and you sew the corners together exactly as you did in step 3.   i.e. Sew where the pin heads are in the photo below - just placed there for clarity for this photo!

  You're ready for putting in the windows, the fun part!  

8.  I found that the squares needed to fit in each "window" were about 1 1/2" but it's easiest to cut roughly 2"squares and trim them as you go.   I like to baste them into the windows with a couple of stitches so that I have a whole whack to sew down by hand.

 Now what you do is roll the edges of the background and sew down by hand over the window fabric, covering all raw edges of the window fabric.  You don't need to sew right through the block, you are just stitching the folded roll to the window fabric.    If this sounds difficult it really isn't.  Because the fold is on the bias it curves and rolls down beautifully and all you have to do is sew it in place with an appliqué stitch.