I finally cut into my New Zealand fabrics! Choosing a pattern was challenging because I usually work with smaller pieces and tend to avoid fabrics with larger-scale prints. The breakthrough came when one of my customers picked up a quilt just before Christmas. Seeing her reminded me of a quilt she had brought in a few years ago. Out of the almost one thousand customer quilts I have worked on, I don’t know how that specific one came to mind—but it did! It was her Illusion quilt. I looked it up immediately and decided to give it a try. I even went out to buy some white fabric for the background and had more than enough of the black Maori scroll fabric from New Zealand to use for the drop shadows.
I spent a lot of time sewing over the holidays and finished the blocks quickly. With 34 different Kiwiana fabrics, each appears at least twice in the quilt—some even three times. I laid the blocks out on the living room floor and shuffled them around until I was happy with the layout. That is when my silly cats decided it was playtime. One of them dashed in, leapt onto the layout, and slid across the hardwood floor on the blocks. I was not amused and had to start over. Eventually, I found a layout I liked and snapped a picture right away—before my two little clowns could ruin it again.
The quilt top has been finished for a few weeks, but the quilting will have to wait. While I usually prefer custom quilting, I think this one calls for an all-over pattern. The fabrics are the star of the quilt, and I do not want the quilting to overshadow them. I have a vague idea of using a scroll design inspired by Maori patterns, but I doubt I will find exactly what I am imagining—so I will probably have to draw it myself. There is just one more issue: I do not have any backing fabric. I know exactly what I want, though—it is a Nutex Kiwiana design that my favourite New Zealand quilt shop received about a month after our visit. Who knows, maybe I need to go back there to buy it. That is a good excuse for another trip to New Zealand, right?
And we are back with the next instalment of the Safari Block of the Month! I hope you enjoyed working on the little giraffe in January.
This month’s block features an ostrich. Ostriches are the largest living birds. They cannot fly, but they can run incredibly fast. While they are farmed all over the world, they are native only to Africa.
Here is a fun fact I discovered while designing this block: ostriches have only two toes. I noticed their feet looked unusual when I was studying pictures, as I somehow expected them to have at least three toes. Before finalizing the design, I double-checked and confirmed that they indeed have just two.
I had the assembled block sitting on the ironing board for a few days before I found the time to stitch down the pieces. Every time I walked by, I could not help but laugh at the silly face looking back at me.
For this block, I decided to make the ostrich pink and purple because I wanted something more colourful than just black and white. Interestingly, the black and white ostriches I usually picture are males, while females have brownish-grey feathers. Huh, the things you learn while designing quilt blocks!
The pattern is available for free download until the end of the month—here is the link. Have fun with it! And if you have a picture of your finished block, I would love for you to share it with me.
EDIT: The month of free download is over, and the block has moved to the pattern store where it is now available for purchase.
While I usually sew my own designs, occasionally a pattern speaks to me, and I just have to have it. I have always admired McKenna Ryan’s beautiful and intricate designs but never ventured to make one of her quilts. About ten years ago, I came across a kit for a wall hanging from her And On That Farm quilt. This block, titled She Had Some Chicks, immediately caught my attention. Being a cat lover, I thought the design was absolutely adorable. So I bought the kit, and into a drawer it went.
I finally decided to make it last year, and the process was surprisingly frustrating. The kit, unfortunately, was not complete. It was missing all of the red fabrics and a few others, and one of the background fabrics was the wrong colour. Since this kit was supposed to include the original fabrics McKenna Ryan designed for the quilt, I found it a bit disappointing. However, this was not the designer’s fault, and luckily, I had enough batik scraps to find suitable replacements, and I bought a new background fabric that I thought matched quite well.
I knew, of course, that McKenna Ryan’s designs involve a lot of small pieces. You all know I love doing machine appliqué, but it turns out my designs do not have pieces that small after all. McKenna’s patterns include some incredibly tiny pieces that can only be handled and placed with tweezers. Thankfully, I have a Brother ScanNCut, so I didn’t need to worry about precisely cutting all those tiny curves. However, since I have never used the Brother for scanning—my own designs are converted into a file format the machine accepts—I discovered its scanning capabilities are rather limited. It recognized maybe half of the pieces, and I had to manually edit the rest. Still, I would much rather edit them on the computer than attempt to cut them out by hand.
I ran into another hiccup when I realized I had not thought things through properly. I should have reversed the pattern templates to match the way I cut my pieces with the Brother ScanNCut. As a result, my quilt ended up being a mirror image of the original design. There are worse things, though, so I didn’t overthink it. I simply flipped the placement guide and carried on.
Placing all those tiny pieces was a nightmare, and I absolutely hated it. I was so relieved when I finally finished. When I purchased the background batik, I had also chosen a backing fabric, so I quilted it right away. I started with some stitch-in-the-ditch around the borders, outlined the main design, filled the background with a swirly pattern and added a different swirl to the outer border. The rest of the quilting secured the appliqué with free-motion stitching along the edges of the pieces. It required many thread colour changes, but that is my favourite way to appliqué small, curvy pieces and, I believe, also the method McKenna Ryan recommends for quilting her designs.
I was contemplating giving the finished wall hanging away because I did not want to be reminded of how much I hated assembling it. But this was last summer, and it took me until December to actually do the binding. By now, the memory has faded, and I am quite happy with the result. I will probably keep it after all and even put it up on the wall once I find the right spot. That experience, though, has made it unlikely that I will try another of McKenna Ryan’s designs anytime soon.
Custom Quilted – Quilt Pattern by Lorna Shapiro
Darlene requested her quilt to be quilted in a style similar to Lorna’s sample, featuring parallel lines arranged randomly across the surface. To achieve this, I noted down several spacing options and used an online random number generator to produce a truly unpredictable pattern. Overkill? Perhaps… but since my mind naturally gravitates towards symmetry, this method felt like the best way to ensure a genuinely random distribution.
