Tag Archives: in the beginning dragon quilt

Quilting the Dragon Quilt

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About five years ago, I had a pandemic project of assembling a quilt kit called In the Beginning. Here’s the finished quilt top from the final post about that project:

In the Beginning Dragon Quilt Kit pieced by Deborah Cooke

And here’s the final blog post about it.

I’d decided that this would be the first quilt that I had quilted by the shop with the long arm machine and took it in there last month. I picked it up and have been sewing on the bias binding – I sewed it to one side by machine, then handstitched it on the back all the way around. This is a big quilt!

In the beginning dragon quilt in blue, assembled by Deborah Cooke, and completed.

The binding is the allover print with the Celtic knots. You can see it more clearly in the detail below.

In the beginning dragon quilt in blue, assembled by Deborah Cooke, and completed, detail

I chose a meander pattern for the quilting and they used a blue thread. It looks really great!

In the Beginning Dragon Quilt – 4

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I’ve been showing you my progress on the In the Beginning Dragon quilt kit – here’s my first post and my second – and today, it’s border time. The kit comes with a dragon border print, which has four rows of the border printed lengthwise. After pre-washing, the repeat lengthwise is just under 24″, with dragon circles alternating with dragon profiles in flames. Widthwise, the repeat is 9 7/8″. The instructions say to cut borders 9.5″ wide, but I wanted the maximum ability to play with positioning at the corners. Cutting four lengthwise strips 9 7/8″ wide will leave 3/4″ of black, at one selvedge or the other. Hmm.

Here’s the orange quilt illustration from the kit:In the Beginning Dragon quilt pattern in orangeThe instructions say to center a dragon circle on the width of the quilt and a dragon in flames on the lengthwise edges. The quilter who made this orange quilt did that, which is why we’re looking at this image this week. (The one who made the blue quilt didn’t.) The corners are mitered, and you can see that with this positioning, you get mirrored corners which is all good, but they each have a slice of dragon circle in them. I don’t love that, so I wanted to explore alternatives.

That extra 3/4″ of black in the border fabric can be either on the outer edge of the border or the inner edge, depending which selvedge you choose to start cutting. It looked to me like this quilter cut pretty close to that Celtic braid, moving the extra black to the outer edge. I cut the other way around, trimming the white from the selvedge closest to the braid, then cutting my 9 7/8″ strips from there.

I tried many options: dragon circle centered on both the length and width, dragon in flames centered on both the length and width, dragon circle centered on the length and dragon flame on the width, then vice versa. I moved the Celtic braid closer to the edge of the quilt, too. None of the results make my little matchy-matchy heart go pit-a-pat.

Then I had an idea: fussy cutting. Here is a bias cut corner, a square with its sides the same width as the border, with a dragon circle centered in it. It’s cropped at the top because that’s diamonds cut out of rectangles.

It’s less than ideal that it’s on the bias, but look at the corner I got with it:Dragon Quilt Corner pieced by Deborah Cooke

Oooooo! I like that! No mitering either. There are always compromises in matching up a detailed border like this one, but this compromise pleases me. The circle around the dragon is almost whole, and the inside of the Celtic braid lines up. This also means that my quilt is slightly octagonal, but I like that, too. I could have patched the corner with some of the leftover solid black fabric, but it’s darker than the background on the border print. I thought it would show.

I cut two each of the borders shown above. I laid out the side borders to have the dragon in flames centered on the long edge and centered a circled dragon on the shorter edges. I couldn’t quite alternate circled dragons around the perimeter as there are six on the long edges and five on the short ones, but I alternated which dragon was in the corner. In two corners, I have the dragon with the spread wings between one the same on the left, and the dragon that’s more in profile on the right. On the other two corners, the profiled dragon is between two dragons with spread wings.

Voilà! Here’s my finished quilt top:In the Beginning Dragon Quilt Kit pieced by Deborah Cooke

It’s huge! Mr. Math used a ladder to take the picture and the edges are still cropped.

Initially, I was disappointed that I hadn’t ordered fabric for the back of the dragon and circles print, but I found a textured black print in the discount bin at Fabricland. It was $5/m and 54″ wide, so that was an economical solution. I’ll put a strip of the emblems along the seams—there’s some left from cutting those six dragon panels apart, as it was between them—and a dragon in flames where the strips meet, just for fun. It definitely needs to be bound with a color. I’m going to find out about the long arm machine quilting done at a local shop and maybe have this one quilted that way.

And the bonus? The leftover fabric makes really cool masks.

In the Beginning Dragon Quilt – 3

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In the Beginning Dragon Quilt in blueMore dragon quilt!

Last week, I was piecing the six blocks with the scales in this design—the ones that are stacked on either side of the central panel—and getting the scales oriented the right way. As mentioned then, I took apart my second pieced strip—the one with two strips of scale fabric with a strip of black sandwiched in the middle—and sliced it into squares. I then sewed the squares together with the scales the right way to make the units for the top and bottom of each of these blocks.

Here’s one of my finished blocks:In the Beginning Dragon quilt pieced by Deborah Cooke

All the scales are aligned!

The print called Flames is the one in the corners of this block. The instructions say to cut two 3.5″ widthwise strips out of the fabric, then cut each one into 12 squares. Because I pre-washed my fabric, I only got 11 out of the width, but there was plenty of fabric left to cut the remaining two. This print is also a one-way design: it doesn’t matter which way you think is “up” but it looks better to have the blocks all oriented the same way IMO. I sewed a couple “upside down”, so my stitch ripper got another workout, just because I wasn’t paying attention. After these blocks were done, I pieced them into vertical rectangles by adding a bit of black sashing.

Next, I pieced the dragon squares into horizontal rectangles with those rectangles of the dragon print. (I did play around with the placement of these, then ended up using the same arrangement as the illustration.) When I had the two horizontal panels on the floor, I realized what a nice quilt you could make with just these blocks. Look:In the Beginning Dragon quilt panels pieced by Deborah CookeI put some of the leftover fabric between the rows—it ran out at the left, because these bands are 58″ or so wide—and put a little bit of the flames at the right. I like it better with the background all the same colour, but even one panel of these six-dragon-panels would make a fun quilt.

Next I cut the two rows of Emblems that go between the dragon blocks and the central section. I wanted to have the round medallions centered in both horizontal strips. I cut for the image not the grain. There’s extra fabric included for matching, but the design was printed slightly off-grain (as grid patterns often are). This is where the shrinkage from pre-washing almost got me. I needed more than three widthwise strips to get enough repeats, and managed to get another half width. Phew! It was just enough.

Here’s the top at this point:In the Beginning Dragon quilt panels pieced by Deborah Cooke

The sun was bright, so it’s a bit washed-out—and even with a step ladder, we didn’t get the whole thing!

I’m pleased to see that the joins in the Emblems bands are invisible. I matched the pattern between the circles as I thought it would be less obvious. You can see the print through the back of the fabric, though, so it was pretty easy to match.

Finally, the borders. The border print runs lengthwise on the fabric and there are four repeats across the width. The kit includes plenty, but I wanted prettier corners than shown in the illustrated quilts. This is going to be tough. The border print has a 23.75″ repeat after washing, which doesn’t divide neatly into anything. You already know I have matchy-matchy disease and this border print is going to make me work for it.

In the Beginning Dragon Quilt Kit

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I was looking for some dragon fabric to make masks a few weeks ago and discovered this quilt kit and pattern. I found the individual fabrics first, several of which are fabulous. Here’s the quilt kit using all of them. It comes in orange or blue:
In the Beginning Dragon quilt pattern in orange In the Beginning Dragon Quilt in blueHere’s the page about it on the website of the designer and manufacturer, In the Beginning.

The collection includes a large central panel, then a panel with six smaller dragons, a border fabric, and four all-over prints (scales, circles, a Celtic knot and a wonderful mix of circles and dragons). You can see the individual fabrics in blue on the designers’ site, right here. The quilt requires all of the fabrics in the collection. I think it might include some solid black, too.

I spent a lot of time looking at this on various sites, trying to decide whether I love it or not. The short answer is that I love the coordinating fabrics but am not so wild about the panels – but then, the panels are kind of the point. The palette reminds me of the original covers for the first two of my Dragonfire novels, Kiss of Fire and Kiss of Fury, which is also part of the appeal. The finished quilt is a big piece – 72″ by 92″.

In the end, I surrendered to temptation. 🙂 Even though the dragons show up better on the orange version, I ordered the blue one. I’m curious to see how the fabric feels on the panels, whether it’s stiff with ink or not. Is there metallic ink on the panels and borders? I’m not entirely sure. It would be lovely to see it in person before deciding, but I didn’t find a local stockist, even if stores were open. It should be comparatively quick to piece – it looks as if all the blocks are squares – but we’ll see. (I’ve already noticed that I prefer how the borders are pieced and the corners mitred on the orange sample, so there’s something to watch.)

I’ll tell you more when the kit arrives, whenever that might be.