One More Vortex Dresden Quilt

I seem to go back to making dresden plate quilts over and over again! I created my red and white Modern Vortex quilt in 2012 as the result of a blog challenge to work with dots. Well, those dots became the setting triangles with my red and white strip pieced dresden block center stage!

A single block set on point with pieced setting triangles. No funky templates or difficult stitching. My pattern as I taught it for my workshop students teaches a simple way to make those pieced triangles. It looks like I appliquéd that dresden block into those triangles, doesn't it? An old trick that goes back 20 years from my quilting magazine days.

Modern Vortex Quilt: 28" x 28"

 Here is the quilt by itself. No extra borders. I've now added the HARD COPY VORTEX pattern in my Etsy shop. 12 well illustrated pages with the multi-sized acrylic template.

Modern Vortex. Block Size: 20" x 20". Set on point: 28" x 28"

Here is the block in blue and white:

20" block in blue and white

Then I made a few variations, one being inspired by Jane Hauprich's multi-colored one.

Multi-colored Vortex by Jane. No borders. Gorgeous quilting!

I played around with some border prints. Made a few quilt blocks and one quilt. I used a longer ruler with a 10" height and cut some VERY old border print from my stash. When you use a border print, you have to cut wedges for TWO blocks to get enough wedges (20) for one block. That's because you are flip-flopping the ruler up and down. My pattern has a tip sheet for working with border prints.

Dresdens cut from border prints. Info included in pattern for making this.

Here is what I did with the leftover wedges from the pink quilt. I plan on quilting this with "ghost" dresdens in the white squares. Not brave enough to start this yet.

My little pink dresden snake!

I made a Dresden Quilt for Red Rooster. Sometimes they send me VERY small pieces of sample fabric and expect me to do something with them. Ha! I sure fooled them with this. Who says the backgrounds all have to be the same color?

Fleur du Jardin for Red Rooster

I squeezed the life out of the fabrics and made everything work. And I pieced the back, too!

Pieced back of my Fleur du Jardin quilt

I put an extra outer border on my own multi-colored Modern Vortex and quilted it last week. It is about 38" x 38". The large scale prints give it such movement!

Multi-colored Modern Vortex with large flowers in the border

Here is a close-up of the center. First, the units:

Multi-colored units

Center of my multi-colored Vortex

I now have this pattern in my Etsy shop: The Modern Vortex. It is an 18 page pattern with several quilt variations: two color, multi-colored, how to make dresdens using a border print, etc. Check it out. This is a digital version. The paper template is included, but if you have any 18 degree dresden ruler, you can use that.

I now have the HARD COPY VORTEX pattern WITH multi-sized dresden ruler included in my Etsy shop. What does the ruler look like? See #4 below. This has an 8" height and is for an 18˚ wedge (so that 20 wedges make a complete circle). Cost: $20 plus $4 postage (I checked with USPS for First Class. USA orders only.)