I finished a quilt last week! This was my second bed-size quilt (I still haven’t gotten around to blogging about the first one), so I thought I’d blog about some things I learned while making it.

First, a bit about the fabric and the pattern. I bought the fabric as part of my first ever fabric purchase. At the time, I knew full well that an entire FQ bundle of fabric would make more beeswax wraps than anyone could ever need, but I liked the Harvest Road collection colours so much I couldn’t resist, and figured I’d find something to do with the rest of the fabric. In the end, I used none of the fabric for wraps, most of the bundle in the quilt, and made a throw pillow cover with the scraps.

It took me a while to choose a pattern (I wanted something more interesting than a patchwork grid, but not too complicated). I eventually settled on the Fireside Quilt, from Bluprint (now Craftsy), by Callie Works-Leary. Unfortunately, I can no longer find any links to purchase the pattern online, only references to it on pinterest, but it involves layering squares-in-squares with flying geese to make large star blocks. Having never done flying geese or squares-in-squares before, it was a learning experience.

Here are some things I learned:

Make a test block!

I did not make a test block. I cut ALL my fabric before attempting to piece any of the blocks, and got very lucky because the sizes specified in the pattern and the colours I’d chosen (mostly) worked, and I was able to assemble my geese as directed, but it was a risky choice. Next time I attempt a quilt with blocks this complex, I’ll definitely do a test block first.

Practice makes good-enough:

There are a lot of very good tutorials online for making four-at-a-time flying geese. I read and reread them and watched and rewatched them and my technique definitely improved from geese set #1 to geese set #20, but even by #20, they still weren’t perfect. In fact, none of my blocks (or parts of blocks) were perfect.

What I’ve discovered though is that when piecing a quilt top, small mistakes are ok as long as they don’t compound into bigger ones. By assembling the inner sections of the blocks as 9 patches, and squaring them before adding the outer triangles, I was able to rectify a lot of my earlier mistakes before I got to the final assembly. There were still some slight differences in my block sizes as I was sewing them into rows and sewing the rows into a quilt top, but they were well below my seam allowance of 1/4″, so I had enough wiggle room to even them up.

Be careful with bias:

This was my first time working with blocks where the edges of the blocks were on the bias Both flying geese and squares-in-squares involve cutting fabric squares diagonally into triangles and sewing them along the diagonal to make the blocks.

However, fabric is more stretchy along the bias than along the warp or weft (which is why bias-tape is a thing in garment making), so getting overly ambitious when pressing bias-cut quilt blocks can cause the fabric to distort more than on non-bias blocks. And indeed, in the photo above, you can see that some of the squares billow out a bit between where I’ve quilted them, which is likely due to the blocks themselves getting distorted while quilting.

I need to figure out flat seams on star blocks.

This pattern has several spots where many seams all meet at the same point (if you’ve done it right). Mine met at the right spot, but got bulkier with each layer I added, making it hard to quilt over them when I was finishing the quilt.

Free motion quilting is not as terrifying as I thought.

I kept most of the quilting simple on this one, doing straight lines with a walking foot that followed the diagonal seams of the blocks, and stitch-in-the-ditch to secure things a bit further. That still left the centers of the squares un-quilted though…

Since I’d already decided that due to its “country classic” vibe, this quilt was going to live at our cottage, I decided to use the center squares as a chance to play around with template rulers and free motion designs. Since the diamond blocks are about 6″x6″, I could align the quilt such that I could easily maneuver around the square before I started quilting it. This resulted in much cleaner curves and more even stitches, and overall I was quite pleased with the result — I still won’t be free-motion quilting entire queen-size quilts any time soon though!

In the end, I was quite pleased with how this came out, as were the cats: