Any Size Zephyr Tutorial featuring Christmas Zephyr!
Good morning! I hope everyone is having a Super Sunday! The Zephyr Quilt-Along starts next week and today I am sharing my Christmas Zephyr quilt.
I have a large box of Christmas novelty fabric that rarely gets used and I decided that Zephyr, with its large pieces, was the perfect way to show them all off. A few of the prints are large scale that they look blobby from a distance, but up close they are perfectly adorable - the perils of using novelty fabric.
The background fabric is Phospher in Rocket Red - there are so many cool "almost solids" out there and if you look at my recent finishes you can see I'm sewing my way through all of them! This quilt wasn't a gift or intended to be done in time for the holiday; I was just having fun sewing with Christmas fabrics in December. My top was done before Christmas, but not long-armed or bound until the new year. My only goal was to finish it while there was still plenty of snow for pictures!
The back is pieced, featuring a block I made for the Fat Quarter Shop's St Gregory Cross launch, leftovers from my Dwight B. Plaid quilt, two pieces of red Christmas fabric I've had forever, and two new pieces I bought to finish the whole thing off. I could have pieced a lot more tiny pieces of red fabric together, but by the time I was making the back it was after Christmas and I was ready to move on to a different project.
The binding is one of Moda's new holiday basics, Tossed Candy Canes in Coal. I fell in love with the print the first time I saw it and am glad I found a place to use it! From the front it's mostly broken candy canes, but I made my binding extra wide so you can see plenty of full candy canes on the back. This picture also shows off the Snow Winds panto I chose (quilting by Lauren at Tekstil Crave).
The finished Christmas Zephyr quilt is twin-sized, but I chose to use the larger-sized rails because of the scale of my novelty prints. I'm a big math nerd, so today I am sharing an easy method for resizing Zephyr to any size (or if you want to make a twin Zephyr with big rails you can just use the numbers in the example below!).
As a reminder, here are the sizes that come with the Zephyr quilt pattern:
But Zephyr is easily adapted to any other size you might want, like my twin-sized Zephyr with the 12" rails. You can download a free copy of the Any Size Zephyr Worksheet here (it will go through the checkout process, but you do not have to put in any payment information), then follow along below to easily calculate how to make a Zephyr in your preferred size! All example numbers below refer to making a twin-sized Zephyr with 12" rails.
First, decide on your finished quilt size and rail size. For my Christmas Zephyr, I wanted to make a 72" x 80" quilt with 12" rails.
Next, determine the number of rails across and down by dividing the desired width and height by the size of your rails. If the result isn't a whole number, you'll need to either round up for a slightly larger quilt or round down for a slightly smaller quilt.
Rails Across = 72 ÷ 12 = 6
Rails Down = 80 ÷ 12 = 6.66 = 7 (rounded up)
Now you can use these numbers to determine how many of each scrap sets you need.
-
Quarter Scrap Sets: The number of Quarter Scrap Sets is decided by the layout of your final quilt. If you are making a square quilt with an even number of rails in each row, then you will not use any Quarter Scrap Sets (for example, in the standard quilt sizes, the queen does not require Quarter Scrap Sets but the king does!). In all other cases, you will need two Quarter Scrap Sets.If Rails Across = Rails Down and Rails Across is even, then no Quarter Scrap Sets are needed.I have 6 Rails Across and 7 Rails Down, so I will need to make two Quarter Scrap Sets.
-
Half Scrap Sets: The Half Scrap Sets make up the outer border of your quilt. Add the number of Rails Across and Rails Down,
then subtract the number of Quarter Scrap Sets needed.
Rails Across + Rails Down - Quarter Scrap Sets
6 + 7 - 2 = 11 Half Scrap Sets
-
Full Scrap Sets: This is the trickiest part of the calculation, but we are going to do it in four parts to make it easy! I've written it out line by line so all the steps are clear:1. Multiple the number of Rails Across by Rails Down.2. Divide the number of Quarter Scrap Sets you need by 2.3. Take the number from Step 1 and subtract the number of Half Scrap Sets and your answer from Step 2 from it.4. Divide the number from Step 3 by 2 to get the number of Full Scrap Sets needed.1. Rails Across x Rails Down = 6 x 7 = 422. Quarter Scrap Sets ÷ 2 = 2 ÷ 2 = 13. (Step 1) - Half Scrap Sets - (Step 2) = 42 - 11- 1 = 204. Full Scrap Sets = (Step 3) ÷ 2 = 20 ÷ 2 = 10
The last step is figuring out how many pieces of background fabric piece you will need to cut. A is the number of Rails Across times the number of Rails Down, and B and C are just double that number.
A = Rails Across x Rails Down = 6 x 7 = 42
B = 2 x A = 2 x 42 = 84
C = B = 84
So for my twin-sized Zephyr with 12" rails, I need
10 Full Scrap Sets
11 Half Scrap Sets
2 Quarter Scrap Sets
I'm cutting
42 "A" pieces
84 "B" pieces
84 "C" pieces
And you're ready to go with your custom-sized Zephyr quilt! If you'd like help with your calculations, please feel free to send me a DM on Instagram or email me with the link in the sidebar. And of course, coloring and counting from the coloring sheet included in the pattern or using the sizes in pattern are also good options! If you are looking to make a quilt with the exact dimensions of the Christmas Zephyr, just use the numbers from the example above.
The Zephyr pattern is available in my pattern shop. Through the end of February, you can get 15% off of Zephyr and all of my other full-size quilt patterns with the code ANYSIZE.
I'm looking forward to sewing along with everyone starting next week! If you aren't already on my mailing list, please sign up to get weekly quilt-along reminders, special coupons, and notifications about new quilt patterns. I can't wait to see what everyone makes!
Comments