A while back, Tara Glastonbury of Stitch & Yarn invited me to contribute Moonshot to her next quilt exhibition, called ‘Ahead of the Curve’. I’m always thrilled to be invited to participate in any of Tara’s exhibitions, so of course I said yes! Then more recently, she asked if I had any other curvy quilts she could add to the mix. Hmm… not really. (The few curvy quilts I had weren’t really suitable.) I did have a few designs up my sleeve though. This was mid-October. Could I finish a quilt in time for posting to the exhibition venue by mid-November? Well, nothing gets me moving like an external deadline! 🙂 Here’s Fizz.

I’ve recently been playing with Irish chain-inspired designs, basically mixing nine-patches with other blocks. I tried a few different ways of connecting the nine-patches, and some of my favourite versions use chunky curves and lines. Here are a few examples:

   

I’ve talked before about how my natural inclination is to design block-based quilts that are perhaps more ‘contemporary’ than ‘modern’. (That tendency was the inspiration behind Unblocked.) To make a design more modern, I tend to consciously tweak it to lose some of the ‘contemporary’ and gain a bit more ‘modernity’. In this case, I added some empty space around the outside and introduced the loops to draw the eye around more.

The final design is a 7 × 7 layout of five different blocks: a plain square (=4), a rail-fence block (=4), a nine-patch (=13), a single curve unit (=16), and a double-curve unit (=12).

I had less than a month to make the quilt, send it for longarm quilting, finish it, and post it to the exhibition venue. I’m usually a pretty quick piecer, and the quilt design seemed straightforward, so I wasn’t too worried.

I didn’t feel like I had time to wait for fabric to be shipped though, so I bought locally. I was lucky to find a good orange and pink (Kona Tangerine and Kona Medium Pink) at Morris & Sons in Melbourne CBD and then the right blue (Devonstone; Blueberry I think?) at GJ’s Discount Fabrics in Fairfield.

I did almost all of my cutting in one session, and pieced the easier blocks (the rail-fence blocks and the nine-patches) on the same day too.

I used the drunkard’s path templates from Jenny Haynes (Papper, Sax, Sten) for cutting the curves. I love Jenny’s templates, and I’ve used them to make several other quilts – like Blue Wave, Whirlwind and Quattro. She has a template for 7″ (finished) curves, so I made my blocks 10.5″ (finished) to accommodate that size. That meant that the nine-patches were made from 3.5″ (finished) squares and the rail-fence blocks from 3.5″ (finished) rectangles.

I did all my curved piecing without pins or glue. It’s been awhile since I’ve tried them that way, and I’m not sure why I ever forgot / stopped using that method. It’s so much easier and quicker than pinning! And with the extra seam allowance in Jenny’s templates, the blocks are slightly oversized and can be trimmed down, cutting away any slightly dodgy sewing (particularly at the ends of the curves, where my convex and concave pieces almost never line up exactly).

Over about two or three days, I finished all the curved piecing, pressing and trimming. I ended up snipping the seams on the curves a little to help them lie flat, which I’ve never done before. It’s a bit nerve-wracking! I only snipped about half-way into the seam allowance, so no more than 1/8″, but it definitely helped the seams (which I’d pressed open) lie flatter.

   

I found it easier to piece the small convex orange pieces to the pink concave side first, so did that before joining them to the larger orange pieces. I didn’t end up taking any pics of the construction of the double-curve blocks, but in the end they were unexpectedly simple to make. (I thought about it for a day while I pieced the other curves, then did one test run to confirm that my construction idea was correct!) I cut orange squares larger than the desired block size, then cut out the 7.5″ curve shape (using Jenny’s templates) to accommodate the pink+orange pieced curve. (I cut the small orange convex pieces from those cutouts.) I sewed that pink+orange curve unit in, then cut out the second curve shape from the diagonally opposite corner of the block and sewed the second pink+orange curve unit in there. This way worked really well, and let me avoid having any odd-shaped orange pieces with narrow sections that might easily distort with too much handling.

Oh, and finishing up by hand-sewing four sides of facing (on a ~73.5″ square quilt) and a hanging sleeve tested both my finger strength and my patience… I reckon it took me as long to do that as it did to piece the whole quilt! I must remember to make smaller quilts 🙂

   

Fizz was quilted by Valerie Cooper of Sweet Gum Quilting using ‘Good Vibrations’, an edge-to-edge design featuring gentle waves. Normally Valerie’s booked up in advance, but I was very fortunate to time my enquiry just right and fill an unexpected gap in her schedule. I’m grateful for the stars aligning, because I couldn’t have finished this quilt without Valerie’s expert quilting.

   

So in the end, I pieced the quilt in about a week, posted it express to Valerie, picked it up about 10 days later, then spent another four days finishing it (trimming, facing and sleeve), taking photos (thanks to Tara’s studio and photography skills) and posting it off. I don’t think I’ve ever made a quilt faster!

As for the name… I like using single words for quilt names (easier to remember!), and I spent a lot of time thinking about oodles and noodles for this one. But the design actually reminds me more of the feeling in your mouth when you drink creamy soda (or champagne!) – the sparkly popping sensation mixed with rounded edges. Hence Fizz! The name feels as fun as the quilt.

Fizz will join Moonshot at Performance Arts Culture Cessnock in New South Wales from 29 November 2025 to 31 January 2026 as part of the ‘Ahead of the Curve‘ exhibition curated by Tara Glastonbury. Later in 2026, a subset of the quilts will be exhibited in Deniliquin. If you’re near either venue, I hope you’ll pop in to see the quilts!