Last year I made my first dresden plate quilt (I haven’t done a blog post for it yet). It is a free pattern from Southern Charm Quilts that I will link at the end of this blog post.
I was still pretty new to quilting so I sent pictures to my sister because I was super proud of this thing. I called her and she agreed it was awesome. Then she was all, “Well you have made a bunch of people quilts and I haven’t gotten one yet. Can I have this one?”
I was like “Over my dead body.”
Her deadpan “That can be arranged.”
I cracked up laughing. I love my sister y’all. She is the best. I say “How about I just make you one?”
Her “Yes please.”
We discuss what she wants and she says she will give me complete creative freedom, but she wants the following things:
- The same pattern (a dresden plate quilt)
- Teal & purple. Doesn’t have to be only those colors, but she wants those colors.
- Music notes somewhere
Can you tell my sister is used to working with artists (my mom & me)? Because she naturally found the PERFECT amount of balance between guidance/direction and creative freedom. While we are discussing this she suddenly goes “where are you?”. I tell her I am at Joann’s getting fabric. She laughs.
This project started suddenly, but it ended up dragging for about a year. I had just made a dresden plate quilt and here I was making another one. It was the first time I had ever repeated a pattern and I did it back to back. Moral of the story: big mistake, at least for me. About an hour after I started I was like, I have chosen poorly. I did NOT want to make this quilt y’all. The whole thing was a struggle to find motivation. The ONLY thing that kept me going was knowing how excited my sister would be.
One of the problems with the dresden plate quilt pattern is that because of the amount of applique it takes a LOT of fabric. Whenever I make this quilt I tend to use a good amount of Joann’s fabric, which I don’t normally do, but again it takes so much fabric, it gets expensive. It is easy to buy some 1/4 or 1/2 yard cuts for the background fabric at Joann’s and I did.
The biggest issue was that my sister wanted this quilt in mostly purple and teal. Those colors would be used mostly on the dresden fans/plates. I am not big on purple or teal. I pulled out my scraps and stash and found what I had expected, which is that I had practically nothing in those colors. You need a small amount of a lot of prints to achieve the scrappy look. I came to terms with the fact that I might have to buy a good amount of purple and teal fabric and only use a little of it for this project. Instead I got so lucky. So so lucky. I uncomfortably asked the lady at the Joann’s cutting counter if by chance she would cut me small strips. The angel at the Joann’s cutting counter shrugged and said yes. I squealed and thanked her profusely. She literally cut me like 18: 4″ strips (little more than 3.5″ to be safe) from different bolts of fabric. I still feel love for that amazing women in Joann’s at 8 pm. She is the real hero y’all. She needs a marvel movie or something.
I cut out all the fabric within the first two weeks of starting the project, but I seriously lagged when it came to actual construction. The project drug through the holidays and drug through the beginning of the year. Worked on a little bit here and there, but never all that much. Then quarantine came. I threw all my restless energy and anxiety into finishing the quilt top. Then I even basted the quilt top within like two weeks, completely determined to finish it up. Spoiler alert: it sat basted for months, never to be touched. It was packed, it was moved, and it was still sitting there all unloved. I kept saying I would quilt it, but you know I didn’t cause I didn’t want to. Then all of a sudden I looked at the calendar and was like “Wow it is August already. Man how time flies”. Then I was like “uh oh. My sisters birthday is in less than two weeks”.
The majority of my reluctance to quilt this quilt came from the fact that it is white/grey on the top and white/grey on the back, and both had a LOT of designs. Do you know what that means? It means that you can’t really see the quilting. That means it is perfect to try new FMQ designs on. This is because if you are terrible and wonky, you can’t really see it. This quilt was the perfect candidate to expand my FMQ skills on.
I make a practice mini quilt sandwich to practice my new FMQ design on before I start on the real deal. I had decided that I was going to conquer swirls. I did not conquer swirls. I was terrible. Even my husband thought I was terrible, which is how I knew I wasn’t just imagining my terribleness. I got super frustrated and decided to just try a loopy design. At this point I was mad and didn’t want to practice much. That was a mistake cause I wasn’t great at the loops either. I quilted my first section diagonally from corner to corner. I then looked at it, nodded and was like “yep, that doesn’t look great.” I threw it into the chair in the corner of my sewing room and pretended it didn’t exist for a week.
A week later I decided that if I wanted to have this quilt done in time, I had to quilt it that day. Before I started again, I decided to do more research on FMQ (oh being self taught). I found out about speed control and the importance of it in FMQ. I tried FMQ using speed control instead of my presser foot. WOW. Game changer. I felt like I should have known this before and deserved a head slap, but I am mostly self taught. I taught myself FMQ with the help of the internet. So live and let learn.
It was so much easier, faster, and looked so much better after utilizing speed control. I may actually be able to try to master swirls again. I quilted the rest of it, made the binding, sewed on the label, sewed on the binding, and finished the quilt all in one day. It was quite the day.
I gave it to my sister for her birthday two days later. I was nervous she wouldn’t love it.
She loved it.
