Flashback

May 18, 2023August 31, 2025 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

Occasionally I attempt to clean out my emailbox, which is a vain and futile attempt to generally keep my life organized. But in this round, I found several stacks of emails regarding Quilt Swaps, a thing we did in the quilt world for a while. Some of my quilty swaps:

And here’s one I received:

I had drafted this pattern for her in my then-used QuiltPro software, because — as she wrote to me — she could see what she wanted to do in her mind, but couldn’t get there. I sent it off to her, and she swapped this back to me. If you need a town square quilt, I have a version of this for sale on my PayHip shop, but it’s more colorful as I used a different source for inspiration.

I started to notice a trend in looking at all these quilts from Days Gone By: strong, bright colors with faded backgrounds, what we often called “low-volume” backgrounds. And lots of solids, or fabrics that read as solids. Maybe that’s why the little quilt at the top of the post felt so familiar to me when I was making it?

And in that mess of emails, I found a link to a post from Never Just Jennifer, detailing a “Round Trip” quilt swap that she was participating in (which is where I found links to these photos; I hope she never takes the post down). Be still my heart! Leaves! New York Beauties! Letters! Flying Geese! Low-volume backgrounds! It checked every box. But wait, here’s the quilt, a tribute to New Hampshire, at the next round, with Trees!

Yes, this was in the day before Design Walls and all that, when we just flat out quilted for fun, exploring new ideas, laying our quilts out on the floor before packaging them all up and sending them off with a book to chronicle our progress. I love that last row for the quilt with Foundation Paper Piecing!

We didn’t seem to worry about coordinated fabric lines, influencing, posting-with-polish-hoping-for-likes. We borrowed. We imitated. We sewed.

In that vein, after the final workman left the kitchen and I was waiting for kitchen-drawer organizers to arrive, I pulled out a stack of cream and black prints, and inspired by this photo from my friend Lisa from easily a decade ago, I got to work.

I remembered the tip from Yvonne, about placing your ruler perpendicular to the seam when making hourglass blocks. And yes, if you want a pattern, it’s drafted with two different versions, and I’m testing and it’s coming soon. But I did want to sew again with that delicious feeling of just making. Of just sewing.

You know what I mean.

Rolling Rainbow Star, and all the minis

Rainbow Gardens

Spectrum: A Colorwheel Quilt

May 10, 2016May 2, 2016 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

Spectrum: A Colorwheel Quilt
Quilt No. 153

You’ve seen this beauty before, as I’ve been working on it steadily since last summer. Since this summer is about to arrive, I thought I should finish it up and get it up in my shops at Craftsy and PayHip (for EU quilters), in case anyone wants a colorful wheel of color on their sewing studio wall.

It’s also great for quilt swaps, or special gifts. I started on mine for a swap, but soon realized I wasn’t going to finish it in time, so made for her instead another colorful creation of mine, Colorwheel Blossom. (It was a colorful Kaffe Fasset fabric swap.) But then I had two quilts, so I gifted one to someone who loves and uses Kaffe Fasset fabrics, keeping one for myself.

Before I sent my swap quilts off, I took them outside for some photos, and love this stack of fun (colorful?) quilts, a prism of quilty delights.

The pattern has templates for English Paper Piecing, if you like to do that sort of thing (I do!) and full instructions for how to put your quilt together. While the color wheel is 16″ in diameter, the quilt can measure up to 18,” depending on the size of your background. It is stunning made up in Kaffe Fassett fabrics, and I’m teaching it that way this Spring in classes at my local quilt shop. Enjoy!

200 Quilts · Quilts

Flying Through a Rainbow Mini Quilt

November 5, 2015May 18, 2023 Elizabeth E.1 Comment

Flying Through a Rainbow
Quilt #152

You’ve seen this one before, but I wanted to give you the directions on how I put it together. I made this for the Schnitzel and Boo Mini Quilt Swap, the final small quilt of my four mini swaps. I know that people traditionally go over the top for this swap, but when I glimpsed into my partner’s life, I realized that she did a variety of activities and wanted to honor that by using the Flying Geese block going in multiple directions, but with a twist: I used two half-square triangles to make the block so I could work in a bunch of neutral light fabrics behind, including a fun fabric that was a bowling score sheet (one of her hobbies–she doesn’t read my blog, so I’m safe to tell).

I cut a 4″ block from sixteen different solids (then sliced it in half diagonally), choosing four gradated hues from four different color families: violets, blues, greens and yellows. I then cut a 4″ block from ten different low-volume background fabrics and sliced those on the diagonal so I could mix and match the backgrounds. Yes I had some triangles left over on the backgrounds, but I wanted a variety.

I cut four 3 1/2″ center squares, then laid out all the cut pieces so I could see the play of backgrounds to the colors. After I was able to get an arrangement I liked, I stitched the two half-triangles together, pressing the seam allowance to the darker side. I trued them up to measure 3 1/2″ blocks, using the nifty BlocLoc ruler I bought at QuiltCon. It’s worth every penny, believe me.

Then I sewed each color family together as if it were a nine-patch, then trued up those four blocks. Last step is to sew the four blocks together.

I am always stumped by “how to quilt this thing.” I decided to keep playing around with the triangle theme: I traced smaller triangles in each larger one, and echo-quilted those. In each color group the triangles are placed in different places, providing a different, yet harmonious quilting design. The background was quilted in the wavy line stitch from my sewing machine. I had to dodge around the triangles a lot, switching back and forth between the wavy stitch and a straight stitch. That’s one more reason I’m glad it’s a mini: they are easy to maneuver on the machine.

So that’s the season for my mini quilt experience. It was a good experience and I had fun coming up with ideas.

Rolling Rainbow Star
Quilt #150

I did finally finish the pattern to Rolling Rainbow Star (above) and it’s now in my PayHip shop, if you want to make a great little 16″ quilt.

I do have one more mini that I didn’t swap. More on that in the next post.

200 Quilts

Mini Madness Wrap-Up (Mostly)

October 16, 2015May 18, 2023 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

This past summer, I joined four swaps, then had my head examined and swore never to do it again. It was sort of a good thing to have some small things to try out my design skills and to keep me quilting, so I guess another title for this post is “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” I do plan to do individual posts on a couple of them (so you’ll see them again), plus I have one more mini quilt that I made with quite a story (not shown, but soon). But so far, here they are, in the order they rolled out from my house.

Mini House_frontlabeled — *The Heart’s Solace: Home, Sweet, Home* (No. 147)

Although a little bit late (she had fabric and pattern issues), Emily sent me mine and I am so in love with it. I ended up drafting her a pattern on my QuiltPro quilt software, which I’m happy to share with you. It’s in a PDF file: Emily’s House On the first page, the piece for the narrow sashing around the central patchwork square is cut off. I’d recommend using the width of the pattern piece as a guide and cutting a strip to fit your work after you start sewing it together.

This post has links to my PayHip store where you can purchase the pattern.

Here is the creative and beautiful quilt I received from that swap–a lovely Dresden-plate type circle of houses. I love them all and love the variety of sewing machine fancy stitches that my partner used. I hear there is a pattern out there for it called Dresden Neighborhood (by Persimmon Dreams) and you can buy it from Craftsy.

One hallmark of swaps is the little gifts that you send, although I did join a swap titled “Simply Mini.” (More about that one later.) I made two of my swap partners Dumpling Pouches and filled them with interesting PostIt Notes, some washi tape and quilty trinkets. I’ve seen some swap loot that is over the top; I hope my partners aren’t disappointed (all of them have received their packages).

Rolling Rainbow Star–I made one for the Simply Mini Swap and then had to make one for myself. I changed up the binding on it to tell them apart.

I love this backing.

Flying Rainbow. The last one I made was for the Schnitzel & Boo swap–the grandmama of all swaps on Instagram, now in it’s fourth year. I wanted to say I did that one, and now I can. The quilter I was to send to liked bowling, cooking and classic comic books, so I bought her some bowling score fabric to use the quilt, and backed it with fabric showing wee chefs and bakers.