Quiltmaker's Blog Tour - 100 Designer Blocks Vol. 13

BLOCK # 1228         TILTED LILY

 Welcome to my blog for volume 13 of Quiltmaker’s 100 Designer block blog tour. This is my block. I named it “Tilted Lily” because the traditional Carolina Lily block is set on-point. This one is in a square setting. I’ll explain how this came about a little further down in this blog. I will be sending one lucky blogger a free copy of Volume 13 at the end of the tour. If you would like to be that lucky person you need to do two things, please visit my Facebook page and click on the “Like” and also leave a comment below. If you have already “Liked” my page then just leave a comment below. I will remind you what you have to do again at the end. Monday, May 9 at 12:00 midnight is the deadline. P.S. if you don't do Facebook, you'll still be included. Just tack that fact onto your comment that you leave below.

Congratulations to Beth T. from Oregon! I hope you find a lot of inspiration in this issue.
And a big thank you to everyone who visited and left a comment! I'm glad you enjoyed my block and my explanation.

My first experience with the Carolina Lily block and Y-seams happened when I decided to enter the competition New Quilts from an Old Favorite. The theme for 2014 was the Carolina lily. I knew immediately that I wasn’t going sew a single Y-seam. No Way! I was sure that there had to be an easier way. The only idea that I came across was to make the lily from two Flying Geese units and a Half Square Triangle (HST) unit. The only problem with this technique was that it made the two opposite “V” sections of the petals too deep and the center “V” was too short. This gave the lily a distorted aspect.

I decided that I would work with the technique that uses two Flying Geese units and a Half Square Triangle unit. I figured there had to be a way to use this technique without the resulting distortion. To do this I needed to use my ever dependable Electric Quilt software (EQ). I drafted a single Carolina Lily block flower that had y-seams. I converted the block to guidelines and then drafted over the outlines and the diagonal line that creates the triangle at the bottom. Then I connected the ends of the diagonal with the “V” of the center petal. This creates a Half Square Triangle unit. Next I simply continued the diagonal line of the flower petal until it reached the side of the Half Square Triangle unit. I called these units “Tall” Flying Geese. To construct the “Tall” Flying Geese units I created a foundation paper pattern.

My next encounter with the Lily block and Y-seams was with our Quilt Guild’s raffle quilt. The design that we came up with was an on point setting and it included mostly non-directional applique blocks. The only problem was the setting of the lily block was directional and we felt that it threw everything off visually. After pondering this for a while a solution was found. In one of the magazines we saw a Sue Garman design, "Bed of Roses" that was set on point and included applique. In this quilt the designer used square set applique blocks around the center block. The directional aspect of the applique blocks around the center makes the design feel like a medallion quilt.    

So I decided that I could do the same thing with our Carolina Lily block by adding triangles to the sides creating a square set. And that’s how the Lily became “Tilted”.
I was planning on sewing “Tilted Lily” block with my “tall” geese technique when I realized that our quilt design also included a Blazing Star block which is also made with Y-seams. The Blazing Star block is used in the setting triangles as a partial block. Since both blocks include Y-seams I felt it would be confusing to use two different techniques to avoid the Y-seams. So I decide that whatever worked for the Blazing Star block would also work for the Lily block.

I knew that this block would be easier for me to construct if it was a foundation piecing pattern. I started by extending the seam lines to eliminate the Y-seams. I noticed that two adjacent areas contained the same color fabric, so I eliminated the seams line between those pieces.

Now it was time to apply the same idea to the Lily block and here is the result. A much simpler way to construct a challenging block.

I hope you enjoyed this blog post. Don’t forget visit my Facebook page and click the “Like” button and also to leave a comment below. If you have already “Liked” my Facebook page then just leave a comment below. Do these things and you could be the lucky blogger to win free copy of Volume 13 at the end of the tour. Monday, May 9 at 12:00 midnight is the deadline