Quilting Tools I love: DIY Portable Design Board

If you’ve read my previous blog post, 10 ways to be more organised with your quilting project or if you’ve been following my quilting project progress, you’ll know that I absolutely love and vouch for the portable design board!

DIY portable design board for patchwork

You can DIY or buy ready-made ones here.

If you want to DIY, you can use cut out cardboard boxes or artboard like this one here.

I made my first set of these DIY portable design boards 5 years back, and they are still very good to use. Some are even made of just cut-out cardboard boxes.

I made random sizes in sets of 3s or 5s, and I find them really useful for different stages of the patchwork piecing of a quilt.

Particularly I love the small ones to chain piece smaller units as I can easily bring them around and they don’t take much space.

But I find that I need to layout larger blocks easily without overlapping and I haven’t got anything larger than a 10″ board, so I made some new ones!

These are roughly 14″ square which makes it perfect for laying out 12″ blocks before piecing them together. These are also made from cut-out cardboard boxes.

You can opt not to put the fabric “binding” on these boards. Simply cover a cardboard piece with batting and it should work as a charm for holding on to the little pieces of patchwork.

But, the fabric binding made these boards so cute!! Hot glue gun mess was definitely worth it.

For the full tutorial on how to make these board, click HERE>

If you don’t want to DIY,

you can also purchase ready-made design boards here.

I absolutely love using mine, and I find myself using them in every single quilting project. They keep everything organised and make it easy for me to transport my little pieces from one place to another. Especially from the cutting table to the sewing machine.

And because of the sticky batting, we can put the pieces up and pick the board up to get a better view of it. Hence the name, design board.