Last summer my teenaged daughter was learning how to piece quilt tops, as a way of practicing sewing straight lines. We got to hang out at fabric shops a lot, something I had always enjoyed with my mom. Fortunately, there is a great quilt shop one town over, The Quilt Ledger. Where I live, it's truly a miracle. There are great shops not too far in Lancaster County, but this one is two miles down the street. And owned by a woman I went to high school with. Took us awhile to figure that one out. Anyway, my daughter's interest reawakened my fabric hoarding tendencies. So now I have a stash again.
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Anyway, very lovely quilts hang all over the shop, and one caught my eye because it seemed so complex. It turns out that the fabric selection caused that effect, but construction is super easy. So I bought the book.
Photo: Simple Style: Easy Weekend Quilts by
Sara Diepersloot
The quilt I admired is featured on pages 33-35, called Surf's Up, Baby!.
It makes a square baby quilt with a large rectangle and three smaller squares to form 12" blocks. Goofing around, I figured that a fat quarter would yield two rectangles and 6 squares (8 if lucky) if cut carefully. Doing the math, that means 10 fat quarters would yield two quilt tops.
This is how the fat quarter would get cut to yield two quilts. I used two fabrics for the photo, hoping it would show up better.
My quarter-inch seams aren't so perfect, so I planned to make a wheelchair quilt to give to the VA project as practice. (I've since replaced my 1/4" foot, and read Sunday's diary about leaders, so I hope this fixes itself.) I wasn't careful with ironing seam allowances to the proper side to aid the next step of construction, so on the next quilt I will follow those instructions in the book. Here's the quilt top, sort of DailyKos orange. It's 2 blocks by 5 blocks, and might need a border to make it wide enough. I hope the person who gets it sees it as a little sunshine in their life.
One of the terrific things Leslie does at the quilt shop is a flat sale. When she has yardage that just wasn't popular, she folds it up, marks it down, and makes you take the whole thing. So I got six yards of this coordinating stripe that I will use for the back.
I also got six yards of this floral panel, with four complete repeats.
I will use it for the back of the second quilt, which will be square as in the book. It will need borders to fill out the sides; I think it's a 25" repeat. I also hope to use a panel as the back of a lightweight kimono jacket; I'm not sure what to use for the front and sleeves.
I love the movement in these quilt blocks, which can be heightened with fabric selection. The sample in the store used some 1940s vintage-type prints so that you couldn't really tell where the seams were. I had to struggle to find the block. Really fun. My daughter was going to use this pattern to make two small (4-block) baby quilts, but she has lost interest, so I will do them. She choose these fat quarters and backing material.
So there you have it. Four quilts of various sizes and colors from one pattern.
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