Vintage Verona hourglass quilt

Happy St. Patrick’s Day friends!  Hope you’re wearing green today.  I know I am.  There’s plenty of little pinching fingers around here ready to catch anyone NOT wearing their green!  As it so happens, even the quilt I’m sharing with you today has green in it.  How ‘bout that! 

Today I have a tutorial on the Riley Blake Cutting Corners College blog for this fun Vintage Verona Hourglass quilt. 

And as promised, a free printable version of the pattern as well!  You can find it here.

When I was adding the borders to this quilt, I felt it needed a little bit more navy to help frame center portion of the quilt.  So I decided to add a flange.  It’s quick and easy and I love the way it looks.  Want to know how to do it?

First, you’ll need to measure the length and width of your quilt top.  You will need to cut enough strips to go around the outer edge of the quilt.  For this Vintage Verona Hourglass quilt you’ll need at least 1/6 yard.  Remove the selvage and then cut 6 strips that are 1” x width of fabric. 

 

Now we’re going to sew those strips end to end but we don’t want to add bulk along that border so let’s join them with a diagonal seam.  Fold one end down to make a little 45 degree crease (just finger press – no need for an iron!)  Now sew along that line to join the two strips.

It will look like this – pretty!

Once all of your strips are joined, trim the excess fabric behind each seam.

Now head to the ironing board.  Press this long strip in half lengthwise (wrong sides together) just like you do when you’re making binding.

Time to sew the flange to the quilt top.  I like to add the flange to the sides of the quilt first and then the top and bottom. 

Start at the top right corner of the quilt.  Place the flange, raw edge facing out and lining up with the raw edge of the quilt.  That nice, folded edge of the flange should be facing in towards the middle of the quilt top.  Stitch, using about an 1/8” seam.  (If you were to use a 1/4” seam here, your stitching may show once you add the border.)

Continue stitching down the side of the quilt and backstitch when you get to the bottom corner.  Simply trim the flange even with the bottom edge of the quilt.  Then repeat for the other side of the quilt.

Now we’ll add the flange to the top and bottom of the quilt top.  Line up the starting edge of the flange like you did for the sides of the quilt.  The ends will overlap here like this:

Continue stitching along until you come to the next corner.  Trim the flange like you did before.  Your finished corners will look something like this:

Now repeat until all four sides of the quilt have the flange attached.

Now just as an FYI, you can add a flange to the inside of a border (like I’m showing here) or you can add it to the inside of a quilt binding.  Also cool.  If this flange were going to be inside of a binding, you would follow the steps above, and then add your binding as you do normally. 

For us, we will follow the instructions on the pattern to add the quilt borders.  Consider the flange just a part of the quilt top.

 

Sew the border on as you would normally do, using a 1/4” seam.

Continue adding borders, following the pattern instructions.  The flange (pre-pressing) will look like this:

Give the quilt top a nice press, especially right along that edge between the flange and the border:

And your quilt top is ready for quilting!

I love that little extra detail that the flange adds to a quilt!  I see more flanges in my future!

I’ve received a number of questions from this post about sewing equilateral triangles.  So this week I’ll have a quick project to show you that uses equilaterals.  For those of you that are new to Eq. triangles it will be a great way to get your feet wet without committing to a large, time (and money) consuming project! 

Happy sewing!