I made Flew Away for my local modern quilt guild's, the Greenville Modern Guild Guild, mini quilt challenge.
The challenge was to take a traditional quilt block that started with the same letter as your name (first, middle, or last) and modernize it. The quilt had to be a mini size, no larger than 36" on any side.
I was looking through my favorite quilt block book Jinny Beyer: The Quilter's Album of Patchwork Patterns to find a good block when I stumbled on the beggars block. It worked as my last name is Brickey. The beggars block is a 9-patch block with butterfly-like units in the outer 8 squares. Here is one full block:
To modernize the design, I started with a full design of 9 blocks, 3 blocks x 3 blocks (so 81 butterfly units) and used my Subtracting for Minimalism technique (which I will be teaching at QuiltCon) to selectively remove some of the elements for a more scattered, minimal, and random looking design.
I thought the design looked like some of the butterflies flew away and that is how the quilt got its name.
Each of the butterfly units finished at 3" square so I used paper piecing to get all of the little points to match. I added a 3" border to help the design float on the negative space. The quilt top measured 33 ½" and the quilt (after quilting and blocking) measured about 32".
For the quilting, I wanted to make a plaid using thread. In each "stripe" I used Aurifil thread in 12 wt., 28 wt., and 80 wt. I marked the center lines through the blocks (the thickest 12 wt. thread) and then used my walking foot to space the other lines. It was a lot of straight line quilting but luckily the quilt was pretty small.
All total, there were 15 mini quilts submitted for the GMQG mini quilt challenge and I got 2 ribbons :) I won a judge's choice ribbon and the viewers' choice ribbon. You can see all of the entries for the challenge here.
