Moonstone – new quilt pattern featuring Twenty, collection by Katarina Roccella

Hello everyone and happy fall!

Fall is a beautiful season here in western NY, with colors exploding, textures changing and cool morning on the porch with a cup of hot coffee and – a new quilt to snuggle under? Well of course.

Here I am to share another free pattern with you, this time featuring TWENTY a brand new and super beautiful collection by my super talented friend Katarina Roccella, for Art Gallery Fabrics.

Let me tell you about Twenty collection!! It might not be as usually collections are, featuring a main floral or two or specific theme… it is a collection featuring TEXTURES and COLORS!! Beautiful colors and super subtle but amazing textures – a quilt pattern designer’s dream!!

The beautiful palette of Twenty fabrics I got to play with (14 out of total of 20)

Once I saw this collection, I immediately started playing with soooo many designs! Among all of them, AGF creative team decided on this simple and very modern one, celebrating the basics of design – line, shape and color.

Meet MOONSTONE.

Moonstone pattern is based on another very traditional quilt block, Drunkard’s Path. Here, these quarter circles are arranged in non-uniform manner to form circles and part circles, playfully mingling together. It is really a very simple quilt to make, and no – curved seams are NOT scary or impossible, I promise!!

Here are some more helpful facts, images and piecing tricks that will make this pattern even easier to make.

As you will see in the pattern, I started by cutting squares first. Background, plain squares are 8 1/2″ and squares from which the shapes are cut from are 9 1/4″ . This size gives you enough wiggle room for good trimming of the final block but not too much waste of fabrics and it makes it easy when using the Classic Curves Ruler to cut shapes. I really LOVE this ruler by Sharon McConnell of Color Girl Quilts! It works well and Sharon has many, many patterns to use it with! It inspired me to design several different quilt patterns to use it myself!

Here are all my shapes cut and you can see Classic Curves Ruler on the top right.

You DON’T have to do it this way, specially if you are using templates – you can just place templates on fabric and try to nest them the best you can to minimize fabric waste. NOTE: if you do use the ruler, there will be “other” part of the squares left over! However, you can definitely use them to make something else – in reverse colorway!
If you are using ruler and squares, the table in the pattern will tell you exactly how many squares to cut from each fabric and then – how many of how different shapes from each pile of squares – I recommend separating the same color squares into two piles – one for “pie” shape and one for “crust” shape, to stay organized.
Once you cut all your shapes and are ready to sew that one curved seam, here is what I do: I make the center of each shape (just pinch and crease), pin that center match and then just align the beginning of the seam and start stitching, maintaining the 1/4″ seam allowance. The center pin just serves as a reference point to make sure you are not stretching anything.

I will try to show you in this video:

Hope you find this video helpful!

Once all your blocks are sewn (did you notice that this block has just ONE seam?? Once seam and you are DONE – how cool is that?! 🙂 ) here is what I do:

I press all the blocks – you can press towards the “crust” shape or towards the “pie” shape, it really doesn’t matter. I find it a bit easier to press towards to “crust” shape but both are OK.
Now comes the trimming part! These blocks are oversized and need to be trimmed to be 8 1/2″ . Important part is that block is trimmed properly – with curved seam coming exactly 1/4″ away from the block edge. In images below I will show you how I do it:

Place the ruler on the block so that TOP and RIGHT edge is exactly 1/4″ from the curved seam (blue arrow stickers!). Make sure that when doing that, your 8 1/2″ lines are INSIDE the block (look at the pink arrow sticker pointing to the corner of the 8 1/2″ square on the ruler!).

Turn the block 180 degrees and now place the ruler so that 8 1/2″ lines of the ruler are aligned with the bottom and left (trimmed) edges of the block. See pink arrow sticker. You will notice that curved seam comes exactly 1/4″ away from the edges (blue arrow stickers). Trim the small excess on the top and right side (if there is any) to complete the trimming of your block.

I hope this helps! If you have more questions about it – just ask! Or maybe I will do a video of this as well? Would it be helpful?

Here are all my blocks ready to go!

Now is the time to lay out all your blocks! As always, if you have a design wall, that is really the easiest, but do whatever makes sense to you! (You can just temporarily tape a large piece of batting on a large empty wall to make a quick “design wall”! Hey, batting that you will use for this quilt will work!! ) Here is mine:

To sew the block together, do whatever makes sense to you. But here is my tip – I DO NOT join all squares in long rows! I prefer to join sections of squares into larger squares first (like take nine squares/blocks) and then join those sections together. The main reason is that this way I avoid having many LONG seams to sew (when joining long rows together), as long seams tend to be more difficult to match all the seams that need to be matched (you will need pins!). Reason for this is that the longer the seam the more chance for stretching (and it does happen, no matter how careful you are!), hence you would need more pins to prevent that. Hope this makes sense? 🙂

OK my friends, I hope these tips are helpful for you! This really is a simple quilt to make, as long as you are patient with your curved seam – practice few times first if it is your first time!

When it came to quilting this one, I had some fun! By now you likely know I LOVE to do my own quilting and I LOVE free motion quilting!! For this one, I really wanted to preserve the crisp look of shapes and colors and all the contrast between fabrics, so I opted for mostly matching threads and fairly simple quilting motifs…

I used curvy, swirly motifs for the circle shapes, in color matching, 50wt Aurifil thread…

I used square-ish meander in the white background (this was 40wt white Aurifil thread)

The only time I deviated from my plan was in this light gray vertical column! I used heavy (28wt) thread in MUCH darker color!! Whaaat…? The reason for this is that I needed to “darken” this light gray fabric a little as it wasn’t quite enough contrast with the white background as I though it would be. It as not as visible? I think using darn and heavy thread achieved that! Do you agree? Here is the photo of that part of the quilt before and after quilting (side by side in a merged photo) – do you see how darker the gray column became?

I really loved making this simple quilt! And I hope I can help you make one as well – specially if you never tried curved seam, this is a good one to start as the block is BIG and that makes it easy to pivot and stitch that curved seam.

Twenty collection by Katarina Roccella is such a beauty! It is every pattern designer’s dream as it had amazing color and beautiful texture, and EVERY fabric in it is an equal player!! I have so many more designs and ideas already made…

If you didn’t already, make sure you visit Art Gallery Fabrics’ Twenty Lookbook to see all the inspiring projects you can do!

Leaving you this October Friday with few more images of my Moonstone quilt and with wishes for happy sewing!

Love,

Marija