31 Days - Day 26: Spooling around

Let's jump to 1990. Back near the start of the series I mentioned that I'd done about three quilts in the peach and green color scheme, all within a few years of one another. This is the last of them. The colors are more orange and aqua, but it fits in the general colorway.

Will's baby quilt

This was for a college friend's first baby. The pattern is a spool, the colors alternating between the blocks. This is a great picture, the lighting just right to show the detail of the hand quilting.

The spool blocks are rather fun to make, and the alternating colors come up naturally if you use the shortcut method to make the blocks.

Block detail

Take a close look at the detail picture. You should be able to see that the large rectangle is made up of twenty-four smaller blocks - four across and six down. In turn, the blocks are half square triangles, where one side of the block is a triangle of solid fabric, and the other is a triangle made of two fabrics, one at the base, the other at the tip. The blocks are turned in different directions as they are next to each other in the same row, and the rows themselves alternate with how the blocks are turned.

The end result of all the turning is the spool shape that first catches the eye.

Making the striped triangle is simple. A long piece of each of the two fabrics is sewn together on the long edge. You then cut triangles from the strip, putting the long side (hypotenuse for those of you who already have the geometry figured out) of the triangle on the edge of the strip.

The fun part about doing this is that you can (and should) flip the triangle template up, so the long edge follows the edge of the top strip in your sewn together set. Those triangles will have the opposite fabrics at the tip and base as the ones you cut with the long edge on the bottom of the strip set.

And no fabric waste.

You can just see at the right of the detail picture the opposite colored blocks. All you have to do is use the opposite color for the solid triangle, and you have a negative image block. Easy-peasey. Well, easy to do, not so easy to explain without diagrams.

The quilt is finished with an eyelet lace.