I’ve mentioned my recent interest in barn quilts, and when I came across this one several weeks ago…well, I immediately knew I had to turn the painted quilt square into reality! It’s called the dogwood square, and it’s featured on the Mitchell County Historical Society Museum in Bakersville, North Carolina. (I liked the sound of Dogwood Star and decided to go with that name.) Either way, the dogwood influence is clear — the center and white “petals” look just like a dogwood blossom, the state flower of my dear home state.
I spent a decent amount of time googling various combinations of dogwood, block, star, and quilt but haven’t been able to find evidence of an actual quilt made with this block, much less a pattern. So I drew it up myself! The finished quilt was 40″ square. Paper piecing seemed like an obvious answer to both minimize seams and ensure accuracy…but at that size, the components were bigger than a standard 8.5×11″ sheet of paper! I took to google once more to investigate the idea of oversized paper piecing, and finally decided it would be easiest to just print on a few sheets of paper and tape them together. So that’s what I did, and it worked just fine.
The original barn quilt has light and dark green where I’ve used light and dark blue. This is a gift for a coworker expecting a baby girl before Christmas, so I switched those colors to better match her nursery color scheme. I was able to work mostly with scraps that I already had on hand, so I’m not entirely sure what all of these colors are. There’s definitely Kona White, Pomegranate and Storm. I’m pretty sure the medium pink is leftover Cotton Couture from my Wildwood quilt. I think the light blue is Kona Cornflower perhaps? And the lightest pink is a total mystery!
I used the same technique that was so successful for me several months ago — a quick-and-easy baby quilt made of a few oversized blocks. No batting. Cuddly minky backing. Minimal quilting, just enough to keep the layers from shifting. And easy self-binding by folding the backing around to the front and machine stitching it down.
I gifted this last week to a coworker who is expecting her first baby before Christmas. And I may just have to make myself a mini version to hang on the wall sometime soon…
I am glad you went with taping pages together, it has worked well for me in the past, too. What a fantastic quilt for your friend and I am amazed this had not been turned into a quilt or block before.
Beautiful
Beautiful!