Introducing Zephyr: A Scrappy Pattern in Five Sizes!
Today we are welcoming a new pattern to the BluePip Designs library. Meet Zephyr!!
Zephyr is a scrappy rail fence quilt, perfect for beginners. Everything is pieced traditionally, and there's no sashing. Much like Chalk Stars, it's just a clever illusion that the blocks are on-point! Sets of rails come together to form pinwheel shapes that dance across the quilt top. Zephyr was inspired by the many fat quarters that I buy impulsively, use a bit in scrappy projects, and then let sit for years. If you don't have the same problem, the pattern is fat quarter friendly too (you'll just have a little bit left over from each)!
I made the Pink Zephyr version first. The gray background fabric and all of the pinks were pulled from my stash. All of these pinks are no longer part of my stash and scrap drawer! Because some of the pinwheels aren't complete, I was able to use multiple sizes of scraps in my quilt top. There are even a few directional fabrics in there, and yes, the quilt pattern addresses that! I went with a loose alternating light/dark pink layout but wasn't strict about tones of pink - anything goes!
The back of the quilt features the only fabric I bought for this quilt, as well as a stripe that was made as part of a scrappy guild challenge. I used more scraps to make the black and white horizontal stripes to get the length I needed for the quilt back. I quilted wavy lines with my walking foot, eyeballing the spacing between them. The binding matches the background fabric of the front.
Once my pink scraps were cleared out, I decided to make a rainbow version. Because I was pulling from a wider pool of fabric, I had bigger scraps to play with so the only logical thing to do was make the blocks bigger! That's right, the throw size of Zephyr is exactly the same as the baby size, just made with bigger blocks!
These blocks are also loosely alternating between light and dark shades of fabric. The background for the Rainbow Zephyr is a beautiful hunter green from one of my new favorite basic lines, Chalk and Charcoal by Jennifer Sampou. It's still a neutral, but it's fun to do a neutral that isn't black, white, or gray!
The quilting on the Rainbow Zephyr was done by Lauren at Tekstil Crave in the Woven Wind panto. It is beautiful and fits this quilt perfectly - even my 9-year-old told me how much he liked the quilting out of the blue! The binding again matches the background fabric; when my blocks touch the edge of the quilt I just like to bind it in more the same. The back is a wideback called Graffiti - once it got here all I can see are tiny Titanics going down in the water but I still love it.
Are you ready to smash your stash and get rid of some big pieces of fabric quickly? Zephyr includes instructions to make the rails in two different sizes and layouts in five sizes: the baby and throw pictured here along with twin, queen, and king sizes.
Zephyr is currently on sale in my pattern shop. To celebrate, all patterns are marked down 20% - no code needed! Sale is good until November 30, 2021. Thank you for supporting my small business and happy quilt making!
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