I Love This Quilt!: Whiskey and Old Lace

Lori’s pick for the I Love This Quilt! page, Whiskey and Old Lace by Nancy Mahoney, appears in the July/August 2016 issue of McCall’s Quilting.

Download the Whiskey and Old Lace free lap quilt pattern here, and read on about Lori’s creative version of this quilt!

Whiskey & Old Love Lace

As I said when I talked about this quilt designed by Nancy Mahoney in the July/August 2016 issue of McCall’s Quilting, I fell in love with it originally because of its name, Whiskey & Old Lace. The only problem was that I was standing clear across the room and misread it as Whiskey & Old Love. As a person of a certain age, and having been married 48 years (yes, to the same guy!), I appreciate the idea of old love. And I got some funny pictures in my head – old love, indeed. Then when I explained to my co-workers why I was laughing at the name of a quilt, we had a good time making jokes about it and decided the next time, I should stand closer to what I was trying to read.

But as I examined the pattern, I realized I like it a lot. And that’s when I decided to make my version of Whiskey and Old Lace. My initial plan was to enlarge the blocks. I even went so far as to draw the block in Electric Quilt 7 software (EQ7) and see what size I’d need to cut the strips and patches. My thought was that with big blocks, I’d only have to make a few for a bed-size quilt.

Here’s what I came up with when I made the blocks finish at 18”. I’d only need 16 blocks and the quilt would finish at 92” square. I thought it was a great idea.

But when I went home and started cutting strips, I forgot that I intended to make the blocks larger and I had all the strips cut for the 9” blocks before I remembered my plan.

So I went back to EQ7 and played again. I thought I wanted the quilt to be for a queen-size bed. Here is the plan for a quilt that finishes at 90 ½” x 90 ½”:

But you have to understand the way I work. I think that everything is flexible when I’m making a quilt. I place finished blocks on my design wall and continually evaluate as I am sewing. Here’s what happened.

I had a beautiful bundle of fat quarters from the Tranquility collection by Connecting Threads. But that’s all I had, just fat quarters, no yardage. As I completed blocks and put them up on my design wall, I liked what happened when I placed the blocks with the same purple print in a diagonal line. So I changed my plan again. One fat quarter made 6 blocks and I used 4 purple prints so the biggest quilt center I could make was 4 blocks wide and 5 blocks long.

The white/white-on-white/cream fabrics and the green fabrics were selected from my Fabric Inventory. (That sounds so much more important than Stash.)

I added a white-on-white border and then pieced the outer border from leftovers from the block making process. Notice that I used all the purple squares I had so the upper right and lower left corners of the border are just small green and white squares.

My completed quilt is 52” x 62”. I like it so much.

I usually piece the backs of my quilts. It’s a fun way to use the leftover fabric from the front of the quilt. And that’s what I did in this case. I used the rest of the fabrics from the fat quarter bundle and all the rest of the strips and tiny squares from the front of the quilt. I filled the spaces that were left with more white or cream pieces of fabric.

I did the majority of my sewing on a couple of cold, snowy days and as I thought about the name of my quilt, I kept thinking the green and purple color scheme made me think of margaritas and wine. I wanted the name to somehow link back to Nancy Mahoney’s original quilt, so I decided to name it Margaritas in the Snow.

Crystal Zagnoli of the Quilted Cricket did the quilting for me. When I sent a photo of the quilt top and told her the name of the quilt, her immediate suggestion was to quilt bubbles. What a fun idea. I’m delighted with how it turned out.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to work on next but this was a fun and satisfying quilt to make.

Lori

Have you missed any of our previous I Love This Quilt! free quilt patterns? Check them all out here!