The Cape May Quilt

Cape May, New Jersey.

Yes! This is where the inspired idea for our studio’s name came from!

While vacationing in the Northeast, my family had a lovely stay in Cape May. Now granted we were there just before the end of the season, so it wasn’t crowded. But the highlight of our visit was undoubtedly a whale watching tour where we saw a humpback whale that the ship’s crew declared to be going “full National Geographic”. Indeed, it was awe inspiring.

So a few days later when we walked into a local quilt shop in search of souvenir fabric and saw this Whale Tale pattern from Sew Kind of Wonderful, I knew what my next project would be. The shop also carried this Fluke pattern from Eye Candy Quilts, so I knew this one was going to have to include a front AND back design.

The Whale Tale pattern was originally created in collaboration with Tula Pink for a sponsored cruise and so I was pleased to be able to locate some Tula Pink Zuma fabric. There’s also some Josephine Wall prints in there. Good stuff.

I tweaked the Whale Tale pattern slightly, changing the fluke to more closely resemble the shape in my mind and enlarging the overall quilt size. This was my first Sew Kind of Wonderful Pattern and first experience sewing curves. Sooo many curves. Talk about jumping in with both feet! So much fun though.

I didn’t want to purchase more fabric for the Fluke pattern on the “back” of the quilt, so I just dug through my stash in search of colors and values that I thought would work.

The Fluke pattern comes with a paper template shape that I think is called “Venus”. At this point I’ve got plenty of curve-sewing practice, but the idea of tracing and cutting out by hand 320 (YES 320!!!) of those shapes in fabric was daunting and sounded like exactly no fun at all.

Enter the Accuquilt. No, Accuquilt does not have a die for this Venus shape (or at least they don’t at the time of this writing and they didn’t when I was making the quilt), BUT I noticed that the Venus shape looks remarkably like (half of) a Clamshell shape. And Accuquilt does have a Clamshell die!

I’m pretty proud of this hack, if only for how much time and hand strain it saved me. I found that if I placed my fabric 1/4″ OVER the halfway point of the clamshell die to allow for the 1/4″ seam, the shape came out perfectly! I drew the line on my die so I would remember each time. Those of you Accuquilt veterans will probably be thinking, not only is this so much faster than tracing and cutting the fabric by hand, but in fact you can cut up to 6 layers at once! And, and, and the die includes little tabs on the shape that help you line it all up when sewing your curves. It’s kind of fantastic. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have made this pattern without the die. Or if I had, I would still be working on it.

And yes, I almost always press my seams open. Sorry, Mom.

This quilt is also the first project I quilted on my then newly acquired Cutie frame and found-on-craigslist Nolting MAQ 14 mid-arm. I quilt in some pretty tight quarters, but it works and I’ve been thrilled with the results. I wanted to try 3 different free-hand quilting designs on this project (which was probably a little ambitious for my first project), but I’m very happy with how it all turned out.