Strippy Chevrons Test Group Blog Post

Hey, Quilting Friends!

Did you see the pictures that I’ve been slipping out on Facebook?

In case you’ve missed the big news, I’m releasing a new pattern on Tuesday May 26th, and so is my friend, Tammy Silvers of Tammarinis!!!

This quilt, Striking Strippy Chevrons, has been quite the journey… and the quilt has evolved over time.

It started about three years ago, when my daughter decided she wanted to make a chevron quilt out of a jelly roll she had been gifted. (She’s not quite interested enough in quilting for me to buy her a lot of fabric, but when a grandmother or a friend buys her goodies, she eventually makes a project.)

Because my daughter’s interest in quilting is minimal, I wanted to find the easiest way to make a little chevron wall hanging.

I pondered for a few days… and came up with about six ways to make chevrons. Three I discarded out of hand, one I skipped because I don’t own that ruler, and I decided to mock up the last two out of scraps. About halfway through the mock-ups, (both in green because I had a LOT of green scraps on hand), I decided that these methods would be beyond my daughter at that point in time. So, I set her up to make an easy, quick chevron quilt that wasted a TON of fabric, and sent her on her way.

Of the two mock-ups… one became a wall hanging… and the other one became a UFO….

After about a year on the UFO pile (I was going to make a pattern out of that quilt), I got frustrated by my lack of progress… and started to market the pattern of the unfinished quilt to my audience as a way to light a fire under my a- sewing machine. Ahem. Under my sewing machine. It wasn’t much: just a hint here and a tease there. But I didn’t finish the quilt OR start to write the pattern.

So the following week, figuring that no one ever reads my emails, I asked if anyone would be interested in pattern testing. One small problem… I still didn’t have a pattern. Oh, well! I hit ‘send’ on the email, expecting to hear crickets from my request.

Next thing I knew, FOURTEEN quilters had agreed to pattern test, and I was writing the instructions on the fly!

I spent about two weeks, barely a half a step ahead of the fastest members of the test group, splitting my days between the sewing machine and my email inbox, walking everyone through the construction of the quilt. (Remember, the pattern STILL wasn’t written, and I was literally making the quilt up as I went along.)

As I wrote, and sewed, and responded to emails, I took a lot of instructional photos like these:

At nearly every point in the design process, a different idea would pop into my head… or into the head of one of my testers. And, since I was creating the pattern as I taught the pattern, I was open to whatever wild inspirations the women wanted to try for their quilts. By the 4th day, almost everyone in the group had a different idea that they were running with, and the feeling of creativity and comradarie in the group was intoxicating.

Someone wondered if they could stretch their focus fabric by widening the strippy strips and reducing the focus fabric. (Strippy Strips was a technical term that evolved in the test group. Much to my editor’s dismay, the colloquialism made it all the way through the revision process and is included in the final pattern. You can check out the official pattern here on Amazon and see for yourself!) Another quilter, Kristin, heard about this variation and decided to MIX the normal-sized strippy strips WITH the skinny Strippy strips like this:

But, somewhere along the winding path of construction, something got a bit jumbled. The skinny strips and the normal strips got mixed, mid-row. Kristin emailed me in frustration; she was going to have to rip half of it apart to fix the mistake-

Hold it right there!

Take a LOOK at what’s going on with this quilt.

Isn’t that one of the most interesting designs you’ve ever seen?

I ultimately left the decision up to Kristin- it was her quilt, after all… but I was crossing my fingers that she wouldn’t redo the construction.

Ultimately, she decided to leave the quilt because it made such a POWERFUL modern statement.

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 I love that you’ve finally finished this quilt! As this is the only pattern I’ve ever tested for anyone (mine is the red and white one) and I really didn’t have time when I committed myself to do it, I was soooo glad I did! It is still one of my favorite quilts I’ve ever made! 
Congrats!! 

Kristin

Anna, on the other hand, decided that she wanted to blast through as many scraps as she could with this project… so she made a KING sized quilt! Here’s what she had to say about her quilt:

 There was about 600 blocks and I used some of them on the back of the quilt in a stripe as I did not have quite enough backing for the quilt. It contains many memory strips of quilt fabric used in other quilts I have made- some that date back to the mid 1980’s.  What a story this quilt could tell. I may have sent these photos before but in case I hadn’t , I thought you might like to see them.

Here are the pictures of Anna’s quilt:

Here are a few more variations that I love:

After the intensity of the sew-along, I needed a ‘little’ break from chevrons- I was seeing them in my sleep. I accidentally forgot about the project for more than six months… remembering it guiltily from time to time, but never quite managing to pull it out of my professional UFO pile.

And then, when I was packing up for my month-long book tour last summer, I printed out every email and every picture so that I could “work” on the pattern while I was on the road… I cut and pasted it all together- old school- with scissors and scotch tape as I made my way across Ohio, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas….

And came home, and did nothing with the pattern again.

Do you know what it took in order for me to finally sit my butt down and finish this pattern? A global pandemic. Yup. March, April, and May of 2020 was finally the right time to finish this pattern.

Did I say finish?

I meant “redesign” and ‘”start over from scratch.”

All new math. All new English.

Another round of testing. (By a friend who had never seen this pattern before.)

And, just to make SURE the math was right, I spent a day constructing a mini-version. (Ok, go ahead and call it a table runner…)

Ultimately, this project took a long time to complete… but it’s a little bit like life. Even when you wind up on all of the twisty, turny paths, you eventually arrive exactly where you intended to be….

It just, you know, took a while to get there.

Jan