Playdate: Victoria’s Dream Quilt

Sometimes, Playdates take a village. Like this one, which was inspired by a vintage polyester double-knit quilt in Victoria Findlay Wolfe’s collection. As we were all oohing and ahhing over a shot of Victoria’s highly prized quilt, the brain synapses started firing.

Vicki: Well, that’s a 54-40 or Fight!

Scott: I could do that!

Melissa: What’s a 54-40 or Fight?

Scott: I could totally do that!

Vicki: I could help you!

And so it went. This historical pattern redux (get the downloadable pattern here) is a companion piece to the feature in our June-July 2013 issue on Victoria’s poly quilt collecting, a quilty habit she shares with collector and quilt historian Bill Volckening. Both Bill and Victoria dish on their love for poly.

Producing the pattern for this quilt turned into a friendly staff throwdown on precision vs. intentional wonkiness. Here’s what Scott had to say about his inspiration for re-creating this quilt:

“I really enjoyed the idea of recreating this quilt in a fresh way.  Our technical editor Vicki drew up the foundation paper-piecing for the triangle portion of the block, which I used and then trimmed to 3 ½” squares. On some of them I trimmed to the points exactly, but on many I didn’t pay any attention to the points, letting them fall where they may in the final blocks because that’s how it was done on the original.  Then I simply strip-pieced two 2” strips, cross-cut them into 2” sections and created five 3 ½” square four-patch blocks.  I made a few of the four-patches offset by cutting some of the subset strip pieces into 2 ¼” and 1 ¾” strips to keep some of the original wonkiness.

“I particularly like mixing up the print and solid fabrics in different combinations and twisting the four-patch blocks to make each block look different even thought they are the same layout. I used mostly Lotta Jansdotter’s Glimma prints from Windham, one print from Carolyn Friedlander’s Architextures from Robert Kaufman Fabrics, and three different Westminster/Free Spirit prints from Joel Dewberry, Amy Butler and Parson Gray.  I also used a vintage print and an assortment of solids from various companies.

“I stayed somewhat true to the original by making the horizontal sashings green, but they were the same green as one of the blocks, so I changed the sashings around that block to a different green for contrast. I have seen this sort of thing done on many vintage quilts, most likely due to lack of material, but I did it for design purposes. I took the red cornerstones to the orange end of the scale, and then I decided to totally switch out the solid yellow vertical sashings to a lavender print. Big fun! And I hope you like our version.”

Thanks, Scott and Vicki! And you Q-bies…don’t miss the story about Victoria’s and Bill’s poly-frenzy in our June-July 2013 issue. And  we even tell you more about the background of this historical block. Read all about it!