mariner’s compass – Quest Quilts

Online Market Quilt Showcase 8 – Rainbow Mariner’s Compass Quilt

The Yellow Daisy Festival Online Market begins on Tuesday, Sept 8th. In celebration of this, I’m making some posts about the quilts I have ready to go. Each day I’ll feature two or three quilts and tell about their process and what I like most about them. These and other quilts can be found in the Quest Quilts shop on this website or in my Etsy shop.

I’m going to be honest here; this quilt is my pride and joy. It’s a technique called paper piecing, and, as you can imagine, is quite time consuming. I’d wanted to make something like this for ages and had the paper templates printed over a year ago at least. They’d sat in a box in my sewing stuff, and I’d all but forgotten about them. When Covid hit, I had the time to focus on something that would take a while to do. I’d made a couple of these before, so I knew it would be a commitment.

I’m in love with the colors and really wanted to show a gradient with the rainbow shades. I’m proud that I was able to use all fabric that I already had on hand except for the white fabric. The border was an afterthought when I realized it needed something it help bring all the colors in line. The backing was fabric I’d bought on a whim, but I was in love with it. I used the rainbow on it to adjust the colors on the front. This has to be one of the prettiest ones I’ve made; it’s certainly one of the more technically difficult. My hope is that it finds a home where someone will hang it on a wall as a central focal point.

Rainbow Mariner’s Compass Quilt

This quilt falls under the “things I’ve been meaning to make” category. English paper piecing is a tedious technique. Each star is made from a wedge, and each wedge is made of two scalene triangles. The design I used for this quilt was a simplest mariner’s compass pattern in the book. The pattern comes from the book Mariner’s Compass Stars by Carol Doak. I’d bought it years ago to make a gift for my husband.

I had originally wanted to make all the stars with batik fabrics, but it didn’t take long to realize that I wasn’t going to have the effect I wanted with what I had on hand. The biggest goal of mine was to use 100% fabrics that I had at home in my stash already. I had the rainbow fabric for the backing and based my colors around it. This was definitely a “quarantine project.” In the end, the only thing that was purchased was some extra white thread. Not bad.

I did get to practice the colors and design on my new quilting software, so that was an extra bonus, and it helped me catch a mistake in my color placement. Can you see what I did?

EQ8 Quilting Software trial run with my colors.

I’ll admit that red fabric is notorious for running dye, even if one pre-washes like I do. This quilt had too much time and love put in to it to take any chances, so I pinned a color catcher sheet over the white sections of the red star. I did NOT come here to play.

The finished result is worth it, and I am in love!

Here is the Etsy listing if you’re interested in purchasing it.

Happy customers!

One thing about making t-shirt quilts and memory quilts is that I don’t often get the see the reaction of the actual recipient. I get to see how much the person who commissioned it likes it, but the actual recipient is rare.

So when a customer shares a picture with me of their quilt being loved by the recipient, I cherish it. I’ve gone through and collected some of my favorite pictures from over the years of people loving on their quilts that I made. It’s a good smile for a Friday.

Tyler — Most recent graduation quilt gifted!

T-shirt quilt 1 — The original memory quilt! First one ever made – for my grandmother.

33688177_1716682991751551_1877200570083704832_n — I think he likes it!

32710763_1706808236072360_2262404856738217984_n — She loved hers so much she brought it to school. My heart!

25348268_1561077040645481_6289983730825439194_n — Pre-school director gets a neat one.

21462804_1476135305806322_8678307598303717600_n — It’s not a quilt, but my dog is definitely a happy recipient.

19399131_1401757319910788_7221197160371787865_n — My buddy loves his Star Wars quilt.

15977621_1237244413028747_6174561837179432854_n — Loved this silhouette quilt almost as much as the new mom.

15781480_1229221060497749_7628115571232233057_n — My husband with this surprise king-size mariner’s compass quilt.

A memory quilt made from dress shirts and t-shirts. This is the mother holding it after it was gifted to her as a surprise.

A graduate holding her t-shirt quilt. I think she liked it.

11043014_10206222346383073_6757689917035449332_n — Baby quilt made from panels for my niece.

52461558_10102690979437903_2338337288666218496_n — Little buddy cuddling with daddy’s Darth Vader quilt.

Mariner Compass King Quilt

Several years ago I decided somewhere that I really wanted to surprise my husband for Christmas. In the past, he pointed at certain quilt designs and commented on how he really liked them. Of course, it was one of the harder designs that he liked – the Mariner’s Compass. At the time it was so far outside of my skill set that I muttered something along the lines of “keep dreaming.” But I really wanted to give him something at Christmas that would WOW him, so I revisited the idea of the Mariner’s Compass design.

It turns out I would need to learn this technique called “paper piecing”to do it. I looked at a couple of Youtube videos, but the best help was my best friend who had already done a paper piecing dragon quilt. After a little tutoring session, I gave it a try.

Slowly I gained confidence and made more and more.

I used his favorite color combo – green and black – and I accented it with white and gold. For better or worse, paper piecing Mariner’s Compass stars don’t look like stars until the final steps of the paper piecing process. This would be annoying except for one important point – I could work on them in front of him. In fact, I pieced most of the stars together right under his nose!

Things became more difficult with I needed to add the corners and begin quilting them. At that time, I was still only using the free motion foot on my Singer Confidence to quilt projects. There was no way that a king-sized quilt would fit for me to quilt anything. I looked up other techniques for how to quilt in smaller sections and then join them together. From what I saw, it looked easy enough, so I decided to take the whole thing one block at a time – all 16 of them. At one point, I took my machine to a friend’s house and quilted there, so I could get away from prying eyes.

Words cannot express the joy I felt when I had successfully joined together those first two blocks! And the relief I felt when I’d finished the whole quilt plus binding – it was beyond anything else! I couldn’t stand it and had the hardest time waiting until Christmas.

Mariner’s Compass Wall Quilt

When we moved into our new house, I noticed at once that the nice, big living area lent itself to a nice, big echo. And I thought to myself that, alas, I would simply HAVE to make a wall quilt for our new home. Such a burden…right?

I did realize that if I was hanging it up in the main area that it would need to be something that I wouldn’t mind seeing everyday and that I was particularly proud of. Well, that can only be one pattern of course – the mariner’s compass!

Like many of my quilts I make, I tried to make this one out of fabric I already had on hand. Luckily for me, I had bought some blue and gold themed fabric at the same quilt store where I’d gone to look at mid-arm quilting machines. I don’t often buy fabric without a project already in mind, but this was too pretty to pass up. And it was the last of the bundles as far as I could see. The only fabric I bought after that was the fabric for the borders.

I like to use the Mariner’s Compass Stars guide by Carol Doak. Paper piecing can be difficult when you start out, but I’d already made a king-size quilt for my husband using this same pattern. So I’d had practice aplenty.

I’ll admit that this pattern, a paper-pieced mariner’s compass, is just about the one pattern I refuse to do on commission. If you aren’t familiar with it, then let me explain. For paper piecing you actually sew the fabric onto paper, and then you tear the paper off after each wedge is done. To make one block you need to make eight wedges! So yes, it’s very time-consuming. But boy the results are stunning!

By the way, the Quest Quilts image I use on a lot of things is another Doak star.

I am eye-balling a possible ready-made quilt at some point using one of these star patterns, but I haven’t fully decided yet. Stay tuned folks!

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