Celebration of Freedom

A fellow blogger from Quilt Inspiration is including Celebration of Freedom in part of a patriotic blog series they’re doing for July 4.  In conjunction with their blog post today, the basic instructions for Celebration of Freedom are being shared here.  This is not a step by step pattern but a guideline to get you started.

This is the original quilt and as I’ve written before, I no longer own this quilt but am making another one.  The new one will have a different border.

The blocks are 9-1/2″ unfinished or 9″ finished.  The sashing is 3″ x 9-1/2″ unfinished.  I used Electric Quilt software to design this quilt.  If you do not have it and would like it, you can order it by following the link over on my sidebar.

The center of the quilt is made up of four “palm” blocks, sewn together with sashing.

If you have BlockBase, this blocks is #3174.  If you do not have EQ or BlockBase, you can draw the blocks out.

Yours does not have to be exactly like mine but all four of your blocks need to be exactly the same.  I paper pieced these four center blocks to get the best points I could get.

The sashing is what I call a stretched quarter square triangle and I also paper pieced it.

Put it all together with a 3″ red square in the center and you have the center of the quilt.

The other block used is called “Old Snowflake” in EQ.

For the corners of the blocks, notice that not all the corners have the red (or blue) strip.  Some are just plain squares.  For those with the colored strip, I paper piece them using this piece. Whether it’s pieced or not, it’s a 3-1/2″ unfinished piece.

The center of my blocks is a 3″ finished fussy cut star (3-1/2″ cut size).  The remaining section is a 3″ finished quarter square triangle.  Each star block has 4 of these quarter square triangles.  There are 10 red star blocks and 4 blue star blocks so you need 40 red quarter square triangles and 16 blue ones.

To see where you would place the pieced corner sections or the plain sections, I’ve tilted the layout so you’re looking at the blocks straight on.

This is how the top actually looks set on point.  The above drawing is just to help see how the sections of the blocks should be pieced.

The brown sashing strips are cut 3″ wide.  For the setting triangles, cut 3 – 14″ squares and cut them on the diagonal twice (like an “X”) so you get 4 triangles per square.  You will need 10 triangles, so you’ll end up with 2 extra triangles.  For the corner triangles, cut 2 – 7-1/4″ squares.  Cut them on the diagonal once so you end up with a total of 4 triangles.

The top at this point should measure about 49-1/4″ x 65-1/2″, including seam allowances.  We get weird measurements because of it being set on point.

Create an interesting border for your top!  Here’s what I plan to do with mine:

If you have any questions, please post the here and I will try to answer them as soon as I can.

Hope you all have a wonderful Fourth of July celebration and as you celebrate our freedom, no matter your political views, no matter your feeling about current or past wars, please don’t forget to support our troops and their families!