Due: June 2015 Meeting

Download PDF here for diagrams & examples

At the September guild meeting, Gyleen Fitzgerald mentioned during her program that quilts with cones as pieces would be favorably received by judges. Okay, we can try this! The next challenge (due at the June meeting) is to do a quilt with a cone piece featured somewhere in the quilt. You can use the cone either as the focus of the quilt, or as a border, or both. There are no size restrictions.

As I see it, there are four possible ways of doing this:

• Y-seam piecing, with diamonds and hexagons as the other design elements. See first diagram for an example:
• Converting the Y-seams to straight seams, by cutting one of the pieces down the middle (but add a seam allowance), sewing the halves to each of the other pieces, and then sewing these two pieces together:

• Straight-seam piecing: adding an equilateral triangle to the blunt end of the cone creates a diamond, and it’s all straight seams from there. See second diagram for an example:

An example of a border would be the portion of this layout which is between the horizontal lines. For this, you would add the triangles to the sides of the cone instead of to the blunt end, again creating straight seams

• If you prefer stained glass (as in the last challenge) and/or fusible appliqué, you could do this as a stained-glass quilt. It should look nice!

I’ve included a cone pattern piece (last diagram), drawn on computer. To make it a diamond, extend the short sides. You are adding an equilateral triangle, otherwise formed with sides one-half the length of the cone’s long sides. To make a hexagon, cut an equilateral triangle from the cone’s long sides, of the same size as that formed when you made the diamond. But remember to add seam allowances!

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