How To Make A Four-Patch Flannel Rag Quilt With The Batting Buddy

Published October 2025

Join Jen as she shows you how to create a four-patch rag quilt using the Batting Buddy Template from Creative Grids! She walks you through how to use the Batting Buddy in a different way to create a unique flannel quilt. Using a quilt as you go method, this Four-Patch Flannel Rag Quilt lets you simply stitch, snip, and enjoy. Made with 10" squares, it comes together quickly and is filled with handmade love.

In this video, you'll learn:

• How to fussy-cut plaid flannel so the lines run straight rather than wonky.
• The four separate jobs the Batting Buddy template does in a single project.
• A change to the marking method that lets you chain stitch instead of stopping and starting.
• How to set up an accurate one-inch seam allowance on any machine — a width most of us never sew.
• Why rag quilts finish the same day, with no trip to the longarm quilter.

Check the links for everything you need.

Introduction

This project builds on the basic Batting Buddy rag quilt — that earlier walkthrough covers plain squares, along with the corner notching and final assembly, so it’s worth watching first if rag quilts are new to you. What’s added here is patchwork: a four-patch block alternating with plain squares.

Nothing about the approach is specific to a four-patch, either. Pinwheels or any other block you like would work exactly the same way, and there’s no fixed finished size — this example runs seven across by nine down, but you simply keep making quilt sandwiches until the quilt is as large as you want.

One genuine appeal of rag quilts: there’s no separate quilting step. No choosing a backing, no sending the top out and waiting a month — or three, around the holidays. It comes out of the dryer finished.

Cutting and Piecing the Four-Patch

The four-patch units start from 5″ squares.

1. Cut 5″ squares from your chosen flannels. A 5″ square ruler makes this straightforward, and it does something useful with plaids: you can shift it around until the plaid sits genuinely square inside the ruler, then cut. If you like your plaid straight rather than wonky, that alignment is worth the extra few seconds.
2. Note the quantities carefully. One fabric appears in every sandwich while the others alternate, so you’ll need roughly twice as many of that one.
3. Sew your squares into four-patch units with a quarter-inch seam.
4. Press every seam open.
5. To join two pairs, stack them with opposite colors meeting, pin firmly, and sew — again at a quarter inch, pressing open.

That quarter-inch seam is worth flagging: it’s the only quarter-inch seam in the entire project. Everything from here on uses a full inch.

Reach for sturdier pins than usual. Fine patchwork pins are lovely in quilting cotton, but flannel — and shortly, flannel plus batting — will bend them. A heavier gauge and a longer pin removes the problem.

The Batting Buddy’s Four Jobs

The template set does more than its name suggests, and it earns its place four separate times in this one project.

1. As a 9.5″ ruler. The outer frame has a gripping back, so you can square up flannel and cut all your back layers with it directly.
2. As a marking guide. Laid over a block, it shows you exactly where the corner marks belong.
3. As a batting cutter. The center piece cuts batting squares — and this is where all those leftover scraps from previous quilts finally pay off. They’re never big enough for a whole quilt, but they’re perfect here. Rough-cut around the piece, then work on a spinning mat so you can cut the whole way around without ever lifting the template, several layers at a time.
4. As a positioning frame. Lay it over your back layer and it frames exactly where the batting square goes. Drop the batting in, lift the template away, and everything is centered without any measuring or guesswork.

Then place your four-patch on top and pin — putting the pins in the areas you won’t be sewing through. Repeat until you have a quilt sandwich for every square in your layout.

Marking for the Diagonal Seams

Each sandwich gets quilted with two diagonal lines, and those need marking before assembly.

1. Lay the template over the block and mark the four corner points boldly. These are your start and stop points later, so they need to stay visible through handling.
2. Mark the diagonals themselves in both directions.
3. Use a heat-erasable pen. Never anything permanent — these lines sit on the finished top where you will absolutely see them.

A useful departure from the template’s own instructions. The included directions have you mark only from dot to dot. That works, but it means starting and stopping at every block. Marking the full diagonal corner to corner instead lets you chain stitch straight through a whole stack. Keep those corner dots bolder than the lines, since you’ll still only sew dot to dot.

On dark fabrics where a Frixion line disappears, switch to a white marking pen or chalk for those blocks.

On thread: matching each diagonal to its fabric colour gives the most refined result — sewing all the red blocks, then all the cream, then all the blue. A neutral grey through the whole quilt is a perfectly good shortcut if you’d rather not rethread.

Setting Up a One-Inch Seam Allowance

Rag quilt sandwiches are joined back to back with a full one-inch seam allowance, which is what leaves enough fabric to clip and fray. And here’s the honest difficulty: most of us can eyeball a quarter inch after years of practice, but almost nobody has an instinct for an inch.

The simplest solution is to lay a ruler down, draw the line, and sew on it. If you’d rather set the machine up once and sew every seam without marking, a seam gauge does it precisely:

1. Lower your feed dogs, or cover them. Otherwise the gauge sits on top of them and rocks instead of lying flat on the throat plate.
2. Hand crank the needle down into the hole for your measurement — slowly and carefully; the holes are small and you’re aiming a needle at one.
3. Rotate the gauge until it runs parallel with the throat plate.
4. Lower the presser foot onto the gauge so it can’t shift.
5. Stick adhesive seam guides along the gauge’s edge to record the position permanently, then remove the gauge. Anything running against that edge is now exactly an inch from the needle.

Stack your guides for flannel. One adhesive guide is enough for quilting cotton, but flannel with batting has real loft — it rides up over a low edge. Stack two, or even four, to build a ridge tall enough that the sandwich actually stops against it.

A seam gauge covers everything from a scant eighth up to an inch and a half, so once you own one it’s good for any unfamiliar seam width, not just this project.

Assembling the Quilt

1. Place two sandwiches back to back — the seam allowances belong on the front, where they’ll be clipped.
2. Pin, then sew from dot to dot only, backstitching at both ends. Shorten your stitch length to around 2 to 2.15.
3. Work in small groups — pairs are easy to manage — then join those groups into rows, and the rows to each other.
4. Clip the corners, snip the seam allowances, and wash and dry the quilt. The dryer is where a rag quilt actually becomes one.

A 60 mm rotary cutter is worth having for this kind of work. As flannel stacks up, and especially when cutting several layers of batting at once, the larger blade cuts deeper than a 45 mm and simply gets through more.

The four-patch is really just a demonstration — the point is that rag quilts don’t have to be plain squares. Any block you can piece into a 9.5″ square will work, with the seams turned out to fray. And you can go as large as you like, since there’s no pattern dictating a finished size, only however many sandwiches you feel like making.

Browse our full range of flannel fabric in solids, plaids, and prints, pick up a 60 mm rotary cutter and rag scissors from our notions, and check the Gypsy Quilter range for sturdy pins that stand up to flannel.