Free Lesson Friday from My Lesson Vault

I've had a presence on the internet for 25 years - yes, I have! I was one of the first professional quilters to offer patterns and tutorials, much of it connected with my 1,000+ articles published in Quilt Magazine. Try to wrap your head around that one - I certainly can't!

I am slowly migrating my free patterns and tutorials over to a more manageable site, so if you find broken links with free patterns, this is why.

But I thought I'd share a blast from the past with my Easy Piecing Dresdens. This is old-school, so try not to laugh at the graphics. But this is the way we had to do things in the Wild West of code-ville back in the mid 1990s. The blocks are 12" in the online version.

Dresden Plates have many renditions. This pattern is for one using a 30 degree template. That translates to 12 wedges for each circle. Think of the math: 30 x 12 = 360 (the degrees in a circle)

Here's one recent 10" block that I auditioned two different ways. These are the same wedges, but I only used 8 instead of 12.

Dresden Butterfly using a 30 degree template

 And then I considered a tilt factor:

Dresden Butterfly coming in for a landing!

I have a few quilts that use the 30 degree wedge. Here they are:

Butterflies at Night was in my first book, Bold, Black and Beautiful. It was stolen in 2005. Never got it back.

Butterflies at Night

I remade it twice. This one I donated to my guild that gives special butterfly quilts to seriously ill children at a local hospital.

Butterflies at Night

And I remade it for Windham Fabrics using one of their 1930s reproduction lines called Storybook Vacation. This appeared in the Keepsake catalog for several months and was a very popular pattern!

Storybook Vacation Butterflies

Well, I just remembered two more (can you believe that?) The VERY first one was made using solids to replicate a vintage Amish quilt I saw in a book. This is the one featured in the vintage online lesson.

Amish Dresden quilt

And I used some vintage (REAL) feedsacks for this next one.

Dresden Butterflies using real feedsacks

You can find the Etsy pattern here: Dresden Butterflies. Or you can take advantage of my "vintage" online tutorial using the link at the top of this post! Enjoy.