Square Dance Quilt Finished

I finally finished this quilt, with a center inspired by Martha Thompson's Square Dance book. If you look back on my blog in 2007, you can see some of the design process I went through.


Here's a closeup of it - you can possibly see the purple and blue fabric have the same pattern, just different colorways. I used many of the same fabrics from the inner pinwheels for the bigger pinwheels in the middle pieced border. This one ended up double bed sized.


Surprisingly, this quilt has been one of the most searched quilts in my blog - the book is more than 15 years old, out of print, and people are looking for instructions. I've received multiple e-mail requests for help. I actually e-mailed the publisher, and they say they have no plans to re-issue the book.

Square Dance Quilt

Well, here's one of the things I worked on at the retreat this past weekend, a small quilt based on the technique in the book 'Square Dance' by Martha Thompson:



Bright, isn't it? I started by sewing a 7x9 grid of 6 inch squares, with a 3 inch border in purple, then drew a template, traced around it on my grid-fabric, then cut the plain squares up according to her instructions. I was surprised how much it shrunk when I rotated the little squares and sewed them back together to make my pinwheels.

Now I have a pile of three inch squares (produced when you hack the plain blocks apart) that I plan to put on the outer border, but the inner rectangle is so much smaller than expected that I need to add some blocks to it to make it bed-sized. There's lots of the purple fabric left, and I also have the exact same tone on tone print but in royal blue, same color value, that would look good in there too.

Here's my dilemma - Should I make the whole quilt with a background of purple... or use some blue as background for the pinwheels to break up the purple a bit? Or should I make some of the other borders blue? I can bind it in blue OR purple. Which of the following two EQ6 design pictures do you prefer? The actual blue/purple fabric color difference is more subtle than the colors you see here:



More on the retreat when I get more pictures ready to post! I also taught a class and have some photos from that, and took a class and have some things from that to show you. :)