Introducing Floppy: A Floppy Disk Pattern

Once again, my pattern design has taken me back in time to the 1980s, but this time it's a pair of fun nostalgic blocks! Meet Floppy!

Floppy disks were the original form of portable data storage and it's amazing to think how far we have come since they were first used. The original floppy disks held about 1.2 MB of data, which means that the photo above of my Floppy mini quilts would be too big to store on one!

You can make a quilt full of Floppys or use them as part of a larger project or an accent on a bag. Today I am sharing two mini quilts and the baby quilt version of Floppy, and I will post the full-size versions in a separate blog post.

I designed the 3.5 inch floppy disk block, or "save icon" as my kids call it, first. This block can be made with 2/3 of a jelly roll strip as long as the fabric direction doesn't matter. In this mini quilt version, I put an open lock square on each side for the floppy disk purists, but you can chose to put it on one side or neither side if you prefer.

The 5.5 inch floppy disk block can stand in for the 8 inch floppy disk if you want to go back even further in time - they look almost identical except for their size. I customized this block by using the selvedge from the pink plus fabric as my disk label. I added white fabric to bring it up to size, but I also could have added extra background fabric around the selvedge for a smaller overall label.

The next logical step was to combine the blocks together into a single Floppy quilt! My mother-in-law and I made this quilt together. After a trip to the fabric store, she made the blue blocks and I made the red ones. The red, blue, and yellow fabrics are all from the Dear Stella Kitty Litter line and the whites and blacks are letters and numbers, which felt right for a baby quilt.

The black binding is the same fabric that I used in the disks themselves and the backing fabric is the mouse print behind the two minis above (get it - mice for the computer-themed quilt? It cracked us up!). The quilting on this one is a simple meander in yellow that I did myself. I also think it would look great in a colorblock style, like I did with my Meeple quilt - that might be my next Floppy project.