I am over-the-moon, beside-myself excited that my quilt, Fanfold, is featured on the cover of the 2021 QuiltCon Magazine. WOW!!!

 

The pattern for Fanfold is one of 10 in this year’s magazine. This is the second time I’ve had a pattern in QuiltCon Magazine; the last time was Flight Pattern in 2020. I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to contribute to the magazine once again! The editorial team are fantastic to work with, and it’s such a privilege to be able to share my work with other modern quilters around the world. I’m so chuffed!!

Fanfold is a simple but striking design that came from Sunday sketch #4, which I posted waaaay back in July 2016. At the time, I had been quilting for less than 2 years, and I still wasn’t super-confident. My designs followed my skills, so they featured a lot of squares and triangles. (The first time I posted a design using curves was two years and more than 100 sketches later!)

You can see that I reworked the design slightly for submission to QuiltCon Magazine. I kept the overall shape of the zig-zagged columns. I kept the spacing, so that adjacent columns never actually touch. And I kept the off-set placement of the zig-zags in the overall frame. But I flipped the whole thing around, so the zig-zags are on the right of the frame. And I added another column. And – most importantly – I added dimensionality to the columns by using two colours instead of one; the zigs (ha!) are coloured one way, and the zags another.

Here’s how I re-drew the design in ElectricQuilt 8, adding colour:

The design was actually super-easy to make. The quilt top came together so fast! The shapes are made from half-square triangles and two types of half-rectangle triangles (2:1 and 3:1). Probably the longest part was just figuring out how many I needed of each colour. Then I cut, chain-pieced, pressed, trimmed using my Bloc-Loc rulers (lifesavers!), pieced into columns, added large pieces of background fabric, and ta-da! Finished quilt top!

I used Kona Cotton Solids (my favourite) in Carrot, Primrose and White. But one of the great things about this design is that you could make it in any colour for the background, with another 2 colours (or 1 colour plus white) for the zig-zags. Lots of opportunity for personalisation!

Fanfold was custom quilted by Valerie Cooper from Sweet Gum Quilting. There’s no way that my own quilting would’ve been good enough to get this quilt on the cover of a magazine, so I’m very grateful for Valerie’s work! I am all about focusing on my strengths and outsourcing the other stuff to people more skilled than me.

I did learn one new skill with this quilt though. I ended up adding a faced binding, rather than my usual standard binding. It was a bit stressful, as I’d never done one before, but I found tutorials from the Silly BooDilly and Cotton & Bourbon super-helpful (just don’t combine them… ask me how I know). Facing really does give a different look to finished quilts, one that’s probably more suited to a ‘show’ quilt. It also worked well with this quilt, as it meant that the zig-zags could run to the very edge of the quilt without being cut off by the binding.

If you’d like to see more of Fanfold, or make the quilt yourself, you can buy the digital edition of the 2021 QuiltCon Magazine on the Quilting Daily website. Print issues will be available closer to QuiltCon Together (Feb 18-22).

If you make Fanfold, let me know! I’d love to see pics! Send me an email or tag me on Instagram (or both, since I don’t always see all notifications).

And if you haven’t already, I hope you’ll register for QuiltCon Together. I’m excited about being able to take part in workshops and lectures from Australia. I hope to get to QuiltCon one of these days, but not this year. Let’s all stay home and stay safe!