A "Faux Flag" Quilt

My husband and I have been preparing to move from living on land to living on our sailboat over the course of the past 3 years, give or take a year.   There has been lots involved with downsizing certainly, and lots of emotional ups and downs with retirement and leaving good friends behind.  To take a bit of a break from all the more serious preparation involved with moving aboard, I launched into an enjoyable sewing project while we were still living on land.  Now, after two months of living onboard, it is finally complete.

"Disappearing 4 patch"

  I hand-stitched outlines of the colored blocks.

"Arkansas Snowflake"

I sewed a number of  projects for our last sailboat, SweetWater, which we sailed on Lake Superior.  When we bought a "new" (to us) boat, I was excited to sew something special for this boat, too.  I learned to sew from my mother and one of the things that she passed on to me was her enthusiasm for sewing something in preparation for upcoming special events.  In anticipation of this most recent "Moving Aboard Event" I decided to make a quilt for our stateroom bed.  The quilt would need to be lightweight since we are planning to follow the warmer weather south when the days grow cold in the north.  I wanted to have a nautical sort of theme, but not be especially "outspoken" about it.  (No giant anchors or 2' wide stripes, that sort of thing).  I also realized that with all the things I did have to do to prepare to leave land life behind, I couldn't afford to spend a lot of time making something extremely intricate.  I went to Pinterest to help me get ideas about the design.

"Ribbon Box"

Pinterest has been great for learning from other sailors about such things as cooking onboard, ports I'd like to visit by sailboat, products and habits that may make living aboard easier, as well as, sewing for the sailboat.  My husband had bought me a SailRite machine for my birthday last fall and I planned to bring that onboard with me.  My old Elna which I have had since 1976 was to be left behind in storage.  I decided it would be best if I did as much of the machine stitching using my Elna before leaving it behind in storage.  I figured that I would do the top-stitch quilting by hand after we moved aboard. So, my first task was to spend many pleasant evenings looking at as many quilt designs as I could find on Pinterest.

"Easy Bowtie"

I settled on a fairly simple color scheme that would "go" with the existing colors on the boat.  NORTHERN STAR is white with a navy stripe, navy canvas dodger and bimini and "sand" cockpit upholstery.  The cabin settees are a softer shade of sand.  So, I chose the sand color as the primary color and would use a lot of white and navy accents, with just a few splashes of red to make the quilt top "pop."  I'm a fan of the "less is more" concept.  I chose a natural cotton batting that was lightweight, and that would be rather forgiving--in other words, would not require quilting more than every 8".  We had enjoyed racing our last two sailboats on Lake Superior and so I decided that a signal or race flag theme would be my guide.

The problem with race flags, however, is that they are not all the same shape.  Some flags are long and narrow with swallowtails, some narrow burgees, some rectangular, etc.  When the blocks are not all the same shape,  it becomes a bit more challenging to put them together in a quilt, especially when the creator of that quilt wants to be able to put it together fairly quickly.  So, I scoured Pinterest for block patterns that just sort of reminded me of flags.  And I chose blocks that appeared to be reasonably simple to assemble. Thus, my title, "Faux Flag" quilt.  To make the project even easier for myself, rather than measure out all the pieces with a ruler,  as I've done in the past, I bought the templates for all the shapes I'd be using, with a 12" square being the largest.  I limited myself to blocks that I could make using those templates.  A couple of the very simple block designs were ones that I made up myself.

 I chose the fabrics I wanted to use, and cut out all of the pieces for the individual "faux flag" blocks first.  I actually sewed up a few more blocks than I would be able to use on the quilt so that I can use them later on pillows to decorate the bed. (My husband refers to those pillows as "Pillows that aren't really pillows).  I sewed each of those individual blocks together on my Elna and then laid them out on a bed, rearranging them until I liked the way they looked together.  I distributed the ones with bits of red somewhat evenly around the entire perimeter of the "flags."  Then, it was just a matter of connecting all of those blocks together with strips of white and to use the primary sand fabric for the center and outer edges of the quilt.  I used solid navy for the quilt backing and made navy piping to go around the entire quilt edge.  With that done, I no longer needed the sewing machine and would stitch the rest by hand while traveling or after we'd moved aboard.

Hand stitching in the cockpit

I have spent several pleasant evenings on the boat hand-stitching while listening to music as the sun goes down--a rather idyllic task when a bit of a breeze wanders through now and then.  It helped to spread the quilt across the cockpit table.    So now that this task is finished, it's time to get serious about replacing some zippers on the bimini, a somewhat less enjoyable task after this hand-quilting.   Sigh.