Quilter’s Mixology – Flower Power

This post is part of the Quilter’s Mixology Sew Along. For details and schedule, click here!

Today’s post is from Lee of Freshly Pieced. Besides having the wildly successful W.I.P. Wednesday, in which you can link up your work-in-progress every week, Lee is also the designer of many beautiful quilt patterns and the author of Vintage Quilt Revival!

Hi, I’m Lee from Freshly Pieced, and I’m so happy to be posting about Angela Pingel’s book, A Quilter’s Mixology, today!

I’ve successfully avoided sewing curves for years. I think the last time I sewed a curve was on my Single Girl quilt, and that was more than four years ago. But when I saw the projects from Angela’s book at Quilt Market last spring, I actually got motivated to sew curves, possibly for the first time ever! That’s how fun and innovative Angela’s designs are.

My design for the sew-along was Flower Power. I had originally planned to do a mini-ish version of it. But then I went and started making it with Heather Ross’s Far Far Away 2 fabric line, and I just got so excited about this quilt (something that happens in my world a lot!), I decided I had to go up to the full-size version. That was (typically) over-ambitious, so I wasn’t able to finish the top. But here’s what I’ve got so far—three more rows of blocks and I think it will officially become my 5-year-old’s favorite quilt in the history of quilts.

Being relatively inexperienced with curves, I struggled a bit at first, but Angela gives really great advice in the “Sewing Curves” section of the book. I was tempted to pin the heck out of my curves before sewing, but Angela’s preferred method really does work better, so I was a convert to her method by the time I’d finished a few blocks.

I happened to have the Accuquilt Go Baby die cutter in the smaller of the two drunkard’s path sizes used in this quilt, so I cut my small blocks on the die cutter, and used Angela’s templates for the larger blocks. Interestingly, my smaller blocks (the ones cut on the die cutter) were much wonkier than the larger blocks when sewn. I’m not sure whether that was something to do with the die cutter or because the smaller curves leave less margin for error when piecing, but if I do another quilt from Quilter’s Mixology, I think I’ll skip the die cutter and just use the templates. Templating the pieces wasn’t nearly as difficult as I expected, and the blocks just came out better.

Thank you Angela and Sara for having me today! I really enjoyed doing something outside of my “usual”.