Jo's Adventures in Quilting: Designing "Blessed Tiles"

Once the third challenge for this season of Project Quilting was announced, it didn't take me long to decide I was going to make a whole cloth quilt inspired by the ceiling tiles in my old church. But bringing that vision to life was another story.

First I had to create the design for one tile. I wasn't able to find any photos that showed the tiles in any detail, but cropping and zooming in as far as I could before it got too blurry on one of the pictures I did have showed me enough to get started.

I began with a design grid.

And used that to start sketching out various options for my tile design. The grid lines helped me to keep the design elements consistent and evenly spaced.

I actually went through three different versions before I finally decided on a sort of hybrid between two of them.

Even though I used the design grid to draw my tile, I knew it wasn't perfectly symetrical and if I just made multiple copies as it was, not all of the elements would line up when placed next to each other.

So I had to redraw it one more time. I used a technique I had seen demonstrated awhile back on an episode of The Quilt Show. While I remembered how to do the technique, I can't remember who the guest was who demonstrated it. Sorry.

As you can see, the design grid I used is made up of 8 identically shaped wedges. So to create a symetrical tile, I really only needed to draw one wedge of the design and then trace that multiple times.

Using a piece of tracing paper, I drew a square the size of my tile. Then I folded the square diagonally, taking care to make sure my lines matched up corner to corner. Fold that in half two more times.

When I unfold the paper, it looks like this. Notice the fold lines are the same as the wedge lines on the design grid.

So now I can trace the wedge I drew onto a wedge of the tracing paper.

Once that first wedge is traced, I fold the paper in half on the diagonal and trace the design onto the next wedge. And now one corner is complete.

I continued folding and tracing until all the wedges we filled and I had one full tile drawn.

The rest was pretty easy. I made 4 copies of the completed tile on my home printer, cut them out and taped them together.

I taped this to the table and placed my fabric on top and then taped the fabric to the table too. Now I could trace the design onto my fabric without worrying about it slipping and having to line everything up again.

Once the fabric was marked, I layered it with my backing and batting and then used water soluble thread to baste around the tiles to be sure they stayed square once I started stitching. I then stitched over all the drawn lines.