Sharon made this “Farmer’s Wife” Sampler Quilt. If you are not familiar with the story behind the pattern, I have quilted one of them before and written a little about the background in that post. Click here, if you would like to read it. It is a very traditional quilt, and since the design “Swirling Feathers” worked well the last time, there was no need to change it, and I used it again for Sharon’s version.

This is the other quilt Shelly dropped off for quilting, her modern take on a traditional pattern. The same could be said for the quilting design she chose. “Continuous Baptist Fan” looks a lot like the traditional design but was adapted for longarm quilting and can be stitched without starting and stopping in between.

This is the first of two quilts that Shelly asked me to quilt for her. Isn’t this a great scrap pattern? Shelly’s version is definitely an autumn quilt, and she chose “Acorns & Oak Leaves” as the quilting design, but it could easily be adapted to any other season, depending on the feature fabric.

Okay, here we go. I was a bit faster than I thought, and the first pattern is ready for download. “Penguin Promenade” has nine blocks, each featuring a penguin. These are cartoonish penguins as you can tell by the scarf and hat the first one is wearing. His friends in the months to come will all be participating in some kind of winter activity. They will all be wearing accessories. Use your scrap bin and imagination for these, they don’t have to be in the colours that I chose for the design. The finished block size is 8″, and the finished quilt size is 38″ x 49″.

There is one major difference this year: The finishing instructions will NOT be included with the last block, and I will NOT provide them for free download. Of course you are welcome to just download the free patterns and assemble them any way you like. If you do the math, nine 8″ blocks do not give you a quilt of 38″ x 49″, and I added a couple of filler rows. These are pieced (no appliqué, no penguins, just plain old patchwork), and it takes a lot more time to write instructions for this than to just place sashing around the blocks and add a border. The finishing instructions will be available separately for a nominal fee. If you collect all the blocks there will be no need to purchase the full pattern if you decide you want to assemble them the way I did. I will however send the finishing instructions for free to anyone who makes all nine blocks and sends me a picture of all of them before April 1, 2021. That gives you a whole year to make nine blocks, and I enjoy seeing what other people do with my designs.

If you want to use the same background fabric for all nine blocks, you will need approx. 7/8 yard. The background fabric does not appear anywhere else in the pattern. For the pieced elements you can pick coordinating fabrics later on. My design is rather monochromatic, I chose only blue fabrics in different values from light to dark for the pieced parts. This is just to give you a general idea, I will post more information on this when I have double checked the math. 

The free pattern will only be available in Englisch/Imperial this year. I haven’t decided yet if I will publish a German/metric version but if I do, it will not be for free download. The rest of the rules are the same as last year, and I copied them from last year’s post:

A new block will be published on the first day of every month at 9 am Pacific Standard/Daylight Time. This means it will already be the second day of the month for some of you. Please be patient and please don’t email me asking when the next block will be published. I don’t like to schedule posts to be published in the middle of the night. There can always be a problem with one of the pattern files, and I would like to be able to fix it within minutes instead of waking up to dozens of messages complaining about the bug. If you find an issue, then please don’t hesitate to contact me, so I can fix it ASAP.

Each block will be available for free download during the month of its publication. It will be moved to the store section when the next block is published. If you miss a block, you can still purchase it for a small fee. Please do not email me asking me to send you the pattern for free. I will ignore these requests. I only charge $2 per block (and that’s Canadian dollars, so it is even less for you in the US), and I will make bundle packs available again for three or six blocks, once we get there, that will give you an additional discount. Please respect my copyright and don’t pass your copy of the pattern on to your friend who might have missed the free download. This will just result in designers not offering free patterns anymore.

And now I think I have talked enough, here is the download link for the first block. Enjoy 🙂

Click to download Penguin Promenade Block #1 pattern (English/Imperial)

Here is a preview of my 2020 BOM that has nine blocks and will start in April. I can’t promise yet that the first block will be ready for download on Wednesday but it should be no later than the end of this week, so stay tuned. I had good intentions but then got a bad head cold last week and had to take some time to rest. Luckily it was just that, a head cold, and I am much better now. I played around with lots of ideas, and at some point came up with this funny little guy who made me laugh. He will be the first block, and eight of his pals will be joining him through the rest of the year. I hope you will enjoy my Penguine Promenade as much as I do.

I am afraid this situation will go on a lot longer than we think right now, and I am trying to get back to normal as much as possible. I am still posting quilts that I quilted last year, yes, I am way behind. Somebody pointed out the other day that I needed to change my watermark. I won’t because I processed these pictures last year, and it takes too much time to do it all over again. But before we go back to looking at quilts, I would like to thank everyone here in Chilliwack who has been diligently following the rules of physical distance. There are exceptions everywhere, of course, but the vast majority have been really good about it, very patient and polite. And it will look like nothing is happening for a while, the case numbers will continue to go up which can be very frustrating. Hang in there, people, and be patient. We are doing the right thing, and staying home saves lives. And now let’s get back to quilting.

Lisa made this baby quilt featuring exotic animals as a gift, and she let me choose the quilting design. I auditioned a few, and then I came across a pattern that came with my machine called “Elephant Walk”. The elephant was cartoonish enough to work with the quilt, and since there probably won’t be another chance to use this design anytime soon, I decided to go with it. The original pattern had some grass between the elephants that I didn’t like. It was smaller than the elephants and left too much space unquilted. I took it out and then flipped every other row to make the elephants walk in the opposite direction. Can you tell how much fun I had with this quilt?

These sure are scary times that we live in! If you wondered what happened to me, I needed some time to deal with the evolving situation and my mental health. I have been aware of what was coming for a bit longer than many of you. Having a pharmacy degree and a math major son, I understand the threat of exponential growth very well. In addition to that, COVID-19 seems to have spread in the WA square dance community before we were really aware of it. We usually danced in Kirkland, WA once a month, and we knew that in February lots of dancers suddenly seemed to be ill. But we didn’t know what it was until March 2, when one of them, a man in his 40s, passed away, and it was confirmed that respiratory failure due to COVID-19 was the cause. Several other square dancers tested positive afterwards, and while most of them are on the mend by now, one very sweet gentleman in his 90s is still in ICU fighting for his life.

(UPDATE: I just received the news that 92-year-old Wayne passed away today. What a sad day for our dance community.)

We had two square dancing weekends in WA planned for March and immediately cancelled everything. The last time we danced with any of the infected dancers was February 9, so we were not worried about our personal health. But there is a lot of mixing and mingling between BC and WA dancers. All events never took place in the end, and for good reason, but I started campaigning to close down square dancing here in Canada right away. At the time people still thought I was overreacting but as you know things progressed quickly. By the time square dancing was shut down and I started working on the quilt guild meetings, people had begun to realize that something was very wrong and we had everything cancelled before large groups were officially banned.

The last week has been one huge mental health emergency for me. I am usually very good at keeping my anxiety under control with progressive muscle relaxation and similar techniques but right now I find it very hard. I am sure many of you feel the same pressure. Be kind to yourself. Sometimes all you are able to do is make a cup of tea and sit on the couch. And that’s okay. These are scary times but we will get through this. It might just take a bit longer than we originally thought. The best thing we can do right now is stay home and avoid all unnecessary contact.

For those of you who are local and use my quilting services, I will continue to quilt for others. I will post an update on the “Quilting Services” page on how I have been handling this without any direct contact. My regular customers have been wonderful in accepting these changes and dropped off bags on my doorstep and discussed quilting options on the phone and via email. But I will have a lot more time to work on my patterns, and I am trying to get my head back into the right place to be able to do this.

I am happy to announce that I have another BOM project with nine blocks almost ready. It should have been ready two weeks ago before the situation started to escalate but I will get my act together and get it ready over the weekend. So stay tuned for next week, and we should be able to start on April 1. In the meantime, please be safe and stay home and healthy.

This interesting quilt in soft colours that gives the impression of woven strips was also made by Linda. The quilting design that I used for this one is called “Lapis”.

This pretty floral quilt in blue and yellow was made by Linda. She asked for low density quilting, and we picked “Ginger Flower” for her quilt, a floral swirly pattern that picks up the five-petal flowers of the outer border fabric.

Nancy made this pretty butterfly quilt using floral fabrics in soft colours. She stitched around the shapes using a machine blanket stitch and switched from matching thread to contrasting threads after a while to make the quilt more interesting. The quilting design is called “Wild Wind”.

Darcie made this cozy flannel quilt in blue as a gift for her son. The quilting pattern “Diagonal Plaid Bias Cut” is my new favourite design for quilts with squares, and it looks fabulous on Darcie’s quilt.

More than a year ago my friend Doris gave me a box of berry fabrics, saying she had made several quilts using these fabrics and was tired of them now. She thought maybe I would have a use for them. Well, it was a box of free fabric… what was I supposed to do, right? I took it home, and when I opened it I saw that there were even a few blocks inside. I don’t remember how many, maybe six or seven. I decided to make more blocks and turn this into a donation quilt for our guild. I didn’t have a plan, and that is not the way I usually work. I need a plan and a backup plan and possibly even a backup backup plan. Just making blocks not knowing where I was going was hard work for me, and that’s why it took so long to finish this quilt. That and a lack of time, of course.

I finished the top before Christmas and managed to quilt it over the holidays. Although I usually like to custom quilt all my own projects, I decided to use a pantograph this time and picked “Strawberry Fields”. I figured I might as well add more berries to the mix. And the quilt is so busy that any custom quilting would have been lost anyway. Then other things took priority, and I finally managed to put on the binding this week, yay. Now I just have to sew on the label, and it will be ready to be donated at the March meeting.