Nine mountain lakes and shorelines, rendered in cotton and hung on a wall or spread across a bed. Here is how one of those pictures actually gets built, seam by seam.
The picture: Nine scenic landscape blocks – lakes, peaks, forest and shoreline from Banff, Jasper and the California coast
Finished size: 60″ × 50″ quilt, made of nine blocks at 16″ × 12″
What's handled: The whole design. Shapes and their sewing order are printed on the panel, with alignment dots at the corners of every angled seam
A scenic quilt looks like the kind of thing you'd need a design wall and a spreadsheet to attempt. It isn't. What follows is one seam, filmed at the table, and the small printed detail that makes an angled join land exactly where the picture needs it.
Step 1: It starts as a printed panel
Every shape in the landscape arrives printed on cotton yardage, already colored, already positioned, with its cutting line drawn. You cut the shapes out. There is no fabric to audition, no pattern to trace, no templates to buy or position.
Step 2: Every seam carries its own number
This is the sew-by-number part. Each seam is numbered, and the number appears on both pieces that meet along it. You start at seam 1 and work up. Two pieces showing the same number belong together, which means the order of assembly is a thing you read rather than a thing you work out.
Step 3: Hold it to the light and find the dot
Angled seams are the hard part of any pieced landscape. Two shapes cut on a slant don't line up at the raw edge the way two squares do, so matching the edges is not the same as matching the seam. That's what the dots solve: each corner of the seam allowance carries a printed dot, and the dots are what you match.
Hold the piece up to the light so the dot is visible, then push a pin straight through it.
One pin, two dots. Push the pin through the dot on the first piece, then through the matching dot on the second, and pull it all the way through before you let anything shift.
Step 4: Bring the second dot onto the pin
With the pin still standing in the first dot, thread it through the corresponding dot on the second piece and draw the two together until they sit flat. Now line up the raw edges. Because the dots are already locked, the edges fall into place around them rather than fighting them.
Pinch the corner between finger and thumb, check that the two dots really are sitting on top of one another, and sew. There is a .125" tolerance.
Step 5: One seam becomes a landscape
Repeat that with each numbers in order and the scene assembles itself: trees against a pale sky, a shoreline, water. No Y seams, all straight line sewing. A block takes about three quarters of an hour at the machine, cutting and pressing included, and the busiest blocks in the set run to roughly forty seams and closer to an hour.
Nine of these make the quilt. They are traditionally pieced throughout, with no Y seams anywhere in it.
The Postcards Quilt Kit is available at krysalisstudio.com.
$174 complete with backing and batting, or $139 for the quilt top materials alone.
Common questions
Will mine actually look like the photograph?
Yes, it should come out pretty close to the photograph. There some variations between photography and screen colors display.
How hard is it, honestly?
It is rated intermediate, and that rating is fair: there are a lot of angled seams and they want your attention. There are no Y seams nor curves seams in the quilt, nothing to draft, nothing to measure out. The dots turn the one genuinely fiddly thing – matching a seam on the diagonal – into a pin and a look.
How long does a block take?
Roughly forty-five minutes at the machine including cutting and pressing, on our own build. The most detailed blocks in the set carry around forty seams and take closer to an hour. 30 minutes to cut and 30 minutes to sew.
Are all nine blocks different?
Yes. Nine separate landscapes, drawn from real places we've traveled: Lake Moraine and Lake Louise in Banff, the Tunnel Mountain hike, Peyto Lake, the Athabasca river in Jasper, and Monastery beach in Carmel, California.
What arrives in the box?
The complete kit is printed 100% cotton yardage at 145 GSM, solid cotton for the sashing and border, solid cotton for the backing and binding, batting, and printed instructions. There is also a quilt-top-only option if you would rather back it with something of your own.
0 comments