Rising Balloons Quilt

I always admire quilts with curved piecing but have never attempted it myself…until now! I’ve had several ideas in my head for years to make a quilt (or series of quilts) based on aerial photography. I’ve yet to actually turn any of those ideas into reality, but this quilt comes pretty close. It was inspired directly by Jodi Godfrey’s Rising Balloons quilt, which also reminded me of photos of crop circles from the air.

The top was pieced from a single Faith Jones’ “Blogger’s Choice” bundle from Fat Quarter Shop. (I did the math before ordering and confirmed that 15 fat quarters would be just enough for what I had planned.) It doesn’t look like that bundle is still available, but it featured several prints by designers like Rae Hoekstra, Carina Gardner, Jeni Baker and more that I unfortunately don’t remember.

Each drunkard’s path block finished at 6″ square so overall the quilt measures ~48×48″ — great dimensions for a baby quilt. I made my own cutting templates for the convex and concave pieces from chipboard. I was really happy with how well my curved piecing turned out! I am too lazy to pin, so I pieced each block by sewing slowly and lining up the curves as I went. If you inspected the top really closely you’d probably spot a few bobbles but overall the process was surprisingly easy. Time-consuming, yes, but still pretty easy.

The backing is mostly Kona cotton in pistachio, with a few of the extra drunkard’s path squares leftover from the top thrown in. I had originally planned to use the leftover bits of each fat quarter to make a scrappy binding, but once it was quilted and I stood back looking at it, I decided it’d be too much. So I scrapped (no pun intended) that plan and used a yellow dotted fabric I found at Joann’s instead.

I kept the quilting simple by sewing diagonal lines every 1.5″ across the entire quilt and I’m really happy with the final result.