To Catch a Thief

I've long been attracted to William Morris fabrics, but the colors don't tend to be a good fit for my usual quilts. So when I saw the Kaffe x Morris & Co fabric collection, of William Morris designs re-colored in a Kaffe Fassett palette, I wanted to find some way to make use of them.

I thought I might try some variation of a wagon wheel design, with a variety of Kaffe's woven stripes as possible sashing. An online image search of wagon wheel quilts produced a range of options, but one quilt in particular drew my eye. This was the Lossie Lane quilt in the collection of the Royal Alberta Museum. I liked the relatively small number of blades in each fan (particularly for these large-scale prints), and the alternating backgrounds.

I drafted a fan block with five blades, and made it as large as I felt was practical (it finishes at 10 inches). Then I set out to make three digital mockups, one without sashing, one with sashing between the "wagon wheels," and one with the sashing going through the center of the wagon wheels. After completing the second mockup, though, I knew that was the version I wanted to make and didn't even bother with the third.

I made acrylic templates using the laser cutter at our library's makerspace. I used paper piecing for the most of the curved fan sections, but there were a couple blocks where I used the acrylic template so that I could do some fussy cutting. Either method came together easily.

The border is fussy cut and uses width-of-fabric cuts. I had to piece these cuts together to get the length I needed, and to match the pattern at the seams I lost almost a full repeat. I used four yards of this particular fabric for the border and a bit of piecing.

I used a solid aqua for the back. I rarely use solids for a quilt back, but they can really show off the quilting.

I recently put together a presentation for our local guild on the topic of quilt labels, and created a slide show of label images submitted by guild members. I was impressed by the creativity of these labels, and was inspired to add a little extra embellishment to the label for this quilt.

I'm considering writing up a pattern for this design. Let me know if you are interested.