Modern Fans Quilt in Cotton and Steel: QAL and Finish

Hi, I am happy to share a fun quilt finish today. Back in September through the first weeks of November, Suzy Quilts held a sewalong for her Modern Fans quilt pattern. I have been sewing for close to 40 years and quilting for almost 30 years and I will admit sewing  curves and those pesky Y seams are something that I haven’t mastered. I jumped in fully to sewing curves with the Suzy Quilts sewalong and with Evie Jespersen of Evquilts on Instagram as my inspiration and final push to try curve piecing.

This is my first finished Modern Fans made in Cotton and Steel prints leftover from my Tribal Plus quilt.  As with many quilt patterns I have to make them mine, and I added a creative border to make it larger.

This is one of Suzy Quilts original Modern Fans quilts that she shared on her QAL.

I started learning how to use Electric Quilt 8 software last fall and I uploaded the Modern Fans design into the program to decide how I wanted to place my fabrics since I had a limited amount left from my previous quilting project. I ended up becoming quite proficient at drawing the curves as I was having a trouble getting it to save in a fashion that I could pull it back up to work with. I designed another quilt while making this one and will blog about it later. That quilt I came up with 5 different layouts on how to use my fabrics so had LOTS of practice drawing curves with EQ8.

This is my fabric pull selection.

Here are all the block components all cut out and the striped  pie wedges pieced. Suzy provides paper templates you can print and cut out. I traced mine on to a clear vinyl cutting board sheet that comes in a package of 3 at the Dollar Tree for $1.00. I was able to carefully cut all my curves out with my 60 mm Olfa cutter. Suzy recommended the small 35 mm one for easy of control. I hope to have my husband cut me out a more permanent set of the matching templates from a sheet of plexiglass.

All my curved pie wedges sewn together and ready for assembling the top.

My first row assembled and things are matching up well.

 This is my completed Modern Fans flimsy without borders in the  original pattern size of 56 inches square. I wanted a larger top but did not have any extra of the Cotton and Steel fabrics to make more blocks. So I needed to come up with a creative border to enlarge the design and chose to continue the design outward by finishing the gray diamonds around the outside of the quilt.

This is a low light indoor shot of the completed quilt.

Here is Modern Fans in Cotton and Steel out on the back gate blowing in the wind.

Hopefully you can see how I chose to quilt this quilt in this photo.

Prebinding shot of all the quilting, well actually I added more quilting to the individual wedges in the larger circles after this photo.

The quiltalong was for 9 weeks  and at the end of the QAL if you had a least a throw top completed then you could be entered into a contest to win a new Bernina sewing machine. I had finished my top early as I needed to start on a commissioned quilt for Christmas delivery. I managed to get my commissioned quilt top pieced and started another Modern Fans that I would be gifting to a little cousin for his first birthday. I was down to finishing up sewing the last rows together of the second Modern Fans when the official deadline time to have photos posted passed. I sewed a row on upside down and had to take it apart. No problem. I will share the second quilt in another post.

Thank you all for the kind words about my memory quilt project in the last blog post.

Thank you for your continued support on reading my blog posts.

Happy Sewing,

Shelley