This past week I finished a quilt for a customer…a very patriotic quilt: Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. I really enjoyed creating the quilt and it turned out very well.
The customer provided a large plastic bin of all the fabrics he wanted used within the quilt to be placed around the center panel of the Eagle. He also wanted a military fabric placed in each corner (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine fabrics).
The bin pictured below is all that is left of the fabrics after finishing this queen-size quilt (measures 90″ x 103″).
It was a challenge trying to get blocks to fit due to the unusual size of the panel. I had to get creative in adding width to the quilt. The center panel was exceptionally long, so width was needed to square up the quilt a bit. To do this, I used a wider blue star fabric border on the sides of the quilt, with a narrower border on the top and bottom. I also had to add “spacers” a couple of the borders to fill in the odd size. In the Log Cabin border, I used the Military fabrics to add spacers so everything would fit. In the outside Patriotic Star border, I again used the blue star fabric as spacers and placed them in the middle of that border which draws the eye to the beautiful Eagle in the center of the panel. The Patriotic Star block twists its way around the outside of the quilt, with the blue point of the block toward the inner blue star border of the quilt.
Below are a few pictures which show how the Log Cabin blocks were added to the quilt center. The photo on the right also shows the blue fabric border which was added to the outside of the Log Cabin border. (Note: the blue border is wider on the sides to add more width to the quilt.) The Yellow center to the Log Cabin blocks represents a light in the window…the United States of America is certainly a light to the world.
The photos below show the creation of the outside border of the patriot star being sewn.
The fabric was cut to size, sewn into three rows to make up each square in the outside patriotic border. These blocks took quite a bit of time…22 hours to sew and set these blocks alone into the quilt! The Log Cabin blocks took 18 hours to create and sew into the quilt.
I chose to use the “Grande Vine” to quilt the quilt on my Tin Lizzie long arm quilt machine. The Vine represents this Great Land the Eagle represents and our Military protects!
The binding was made using a Faux Flange binding. I used the Blue Star fabric as the binding with the white flag background fabric as the Faux Flange. Over 420″ of both the blue and the white flag background fabrics were cut into strips, then sewn lengthwise to create a 420″ long binding. That was pressed and prepared to attach to the quilt by sewing it onto the back of the quilt, mitering all four edges, and creating a joining for the start and end of the binding. The Faux Flange binding was then turned to the front of the quilt and stitched down in the Flange “ditch” to secure it to the quilt front.
Labels are important to tell the history of a quilt. My preferred labels are ‘organic’ in that they are hand-written with a permanent fabric pen to list the details of who made the quilt and when, its title, and the person for whom it was made.
My labels are bound with the same binding that I use for the quilt. So, you can also see the Faux Flange binding here on the label.
The quilt took 63 hours to create, quilt and bind. This one took much longer than most queen size quilts because there was a lot of designing, calculating and piecing involved. I am very happy with the result and it was worth the time it took to create this quilt to honor The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave!
Hope you enjoyed learning about the construction of this quilt! …Happy Quilting!
Lori Dickman