Sundial Quilt

I love old quilts. I have reproduce some old Amish quilts and is busy with a Dear Jane quilt. (The Dear Jane is a modern version not a reproduction.) Two Quilts in the Victoria and Albert museum is on my list to make. I started with one; The George III coverlet. I only made three blocks. I still plan to make that quilt but got involved with other projects.

The Sundial quilt is a lovely medallion quilt consisting of an inner part with a Sundial as centre piece with  smaller blocks around it. A border strip divide it from the wide border consisting of larger blocks. The distinctive element in this quilt is that every block is repeated four times. So each quarter are repeated in a mirror image on the other side. This change this quilt from the sampler appearance where one sometimes have difficulty to balance the quilt in a pleasing overall design. This produce a very elegant quilt with a more formal and less haphazard appearance.

Until I have permission from the Victoria and Albert museum in which care this quilt is to display one of their images on my blog I must refer you to this site for some
https://www.pinterest.com/meswaterman/1797-sundial-quilt/

I decided to make the inner blocks 9 cm and the "border" blocks 15 cm. I think in the original quilt it might be slightly smaller but I does not want to work that small. The quilt itself will be 285 X 315 cm once I have finished it.

I draw the blocks in EQ7 and could construct this image of a quarter of the centre of the quilt:

I tried to colour the blocks as close as possible to the original block (as I can determine from the photographs that I am using).

I have started to make some of the blocks, I am not working very sistematically, the following blocks is  the bigger blocks in the outer area.

A Nine patch in a square

I also completed 4 of the circles blocks, There is two sets of blocks that are repeated in a slightly differnt colourway. The circle blocks is one of those. This is the one version of this blocks:

The quilter of the original quilt made mirror images of the block. I realised that to late, my blocks are all identical in the arrangement of the coloured circles. I am not very good at applique, as you can see in the positioning of my circles, now that I have the photo in front of me I can see how skew my placement was. I am not going to unpick this- there is four more like this, I will try and do a better job with them.

I was amazed at how many fabrics I had that I could use to give a reproduced look to my quilt. Over the years I bought many bolt ends or packets of fabric. This older reproduction type fabric was in many such bundles and I have more than enough fabric to produce this quilt. In fact I am cutting fabric for my friend Rita so that she can also work with me and make a quilt with this pattern as well.

Hope to have the center ready in a short while. I am not sure what I will do in the place of the Sundial centre. I will not attempt the lettering in the original quilt but have not decide yet with what to replace it.

Carolyn Konig do have this pattern as a block of the month project available. I like to draw my patterns in EQ so I am doing it myself. If you would like to make this quilt her pattern may be what you need.

Marié