Another August UFO Finish: Ole Glory Flag Quilt

My Ole Glory Flag Quilt is my second finish in August for the Country Threads Dirty Dozen UFO Challenge.  This quilt is one of my oldest UFOs I’ve listed for this year’s Challenge and was started over twenty years ago after 9/11 when many quilters were making patriotic quilts. Also worth noting for this UFO is that this is the oldest one I worked on during the years of the Challenge and that it wasn’t just a Flimsy which needed to be machine quilted but one that needed the blocks sewn with over twenty-year old fabric. Fortunately, I still love these prints, since many of the red/blue/white and patriotic quilts in my house have these fabrics/prints.

When I was gathering projects in mid June in anticipation of my annual participation in the UFO Challenge and looking in a cabinet which contains mostly kits and some UFOs, I came across the Ole Glory Flag Quilt project box which contained a few pieced blocks, foundation paper patterns, fabric yardage, cut patches ready to sew onto the foundation paper with a layout and some notes. I decided to add this project to this list since I thought of it while I was working on my Wensleydale Quilt which also had foundation pieced blocks with a similar diamond pattern.

I started sewing the blocks in July while I was at the GP House which turned out to be good timing since this ended up to be one of my August UFO projects.  I did not have a printed pattern for the quilt but I remembered how it looked, so I thought. There were three different types of foundation blocks for the flag quilt; a diamond shape with four points, a square with two points and a rectangle with points. After looking at the few diamond blocks which were already sewn, I realized before I started sewing the blocks that color placement of the fabric was important for each foundation piece so that the reds and blues points alternated around the Moda Georgetown flag print. I also decided that I was not going to make an almost 72” square quilt but instead make a wall hanging measuring 36”x45”. Once I decided on the new size, I had to determined how many of each block type  needed the red patch to be on the upper right or upper left.

After I finished all the foundation pieced blocks, I thought I should find the actual pattern for the Flag Quilt. I had mentioned in a July post that this was a Sandy Gervais Flag Quilt project but could not find the pattern online nor in my pattern library. After thinking about it, I finally remembered that this was a pattern by Jodi Barrows and was in her Blocks by the Square book published in 1999. This block was designed to be used with her Square in a Square ruler which I instead designed the foundation pieces using Electric Quilt’s Sew Precise software so the blocks could be more accurately sewn.

It turned out to be a good thing I found this pattern because I realized my original layout was wrong with using too many of the flag prints and I needed a plain rectangle block for the center row. I looked through my bins of Sandy Gervais fabrics and couldn’t find the right fabric so I then looked through my Navy Blue bin of older and traditional fabrics and found the Sandy Gervais I Pledge Allegiance print there and it was perfect. BTW, when I first thought this quilt was a Sandy Gervais pattern, I was going to name this quilt, I Pledge Allegiance #2 which I will show you why later in this post.

When I was digging around the Navy Blue stash, I found another Sandy Gervais print for the outer border. The light fabrics for the inner border and plain blocks along the sides were found in my older stash of light prints which I also found a lot of oldies but goodies. The flimsy was finished last week and I couldn’t decide how I was going to quilt it because I didn’t want any machine quilting on the flag print. I was thinking that I wouldn’t be able to finish it by the end of August.

While at the GP House this past weekend and looking at a pic of the flimsy, I saw how I wanted to do the machine quilting. I did vertical straight line quilting spaced 1/2” apart on the center row and then horizontal line quilting spaced 1/2” apart on the  rows which did not have a flag print which resulted in the plain blocks with the I Pledge Allegiance print to have grid quilting. I also quilted in the ditch on the outer star points and inner border.

Here are some close-up shots of the quilt backing which is yardage of a Joined At The Hip print, the machine quilting which I used a CT Essential Thread in Caramel and a shot of the blue border print which I also used for the binding, so you can see it had red dots which may not be noticeable in the other photos. I want to mention that some of the photos of this quilt are too yellow/gold and the photo in the lower right corner is the most accurate.

Also worth mentioning again is that the Ole Glory Flag quilt uses fabric I pulled over twenty years ago from my stash and I do remember that I included a light print which had trains (you can see on the top diamond block) in recognition of the Chinese immigrants who help build the Transcontinental Railroad.

Here is why the Ole Glory Flag Quilt was originally going to be named I Pledge Allegiance #2 is because the above quilt is a Sandy Gervais I Pledge Allegiance pattern which I finished over twenty years ago. This quilt is 64” wide and 38” tall and includes the entire Pledge and stars I hand embroidered. I think this quilt may have been one of the reasons why I didn’t finish the Ole Glory Flag Quilt since once I finished this, I may not have wanted to work on another flag project for at least another twenty years. Just kidding, since then I have done quite a few more quilts in red, white and blue and several flag quilts which I may have alluded in previous posts was because it was the color and or theme of my Family Room. I realized while I was working on Ole Glory and wondering if I’ve made too many flag and patriotic quilts, I had a “Duh” moment—I reminded myself I was born on Flag Day and may have not mention this in my posts for several reasons. Like the fabric I buy with Roses because it has my name on it, I can say the same for Flag prints and patterns. 

One last pic of the Master Quilt Holder holding Ole Glory from behind a tree which is a great way to photograph a small quilt without him having to stoop. I thought this was going to be a quiet Post but it turned out I had a lot to say/explain about this over twenty-year old UFO and that a lot of memory muscle, searching for pattern facts and rediscovering old fabrics went into the making. Now when I start a new project, I take a lots of pics on my iPhone so I have a record of when I started, a pattern pic and the fabrics used but I also should include some written info since I never know if one of my current projects is going to be a future UFO finished by the darling Granddaughter who is becoming quite a Quilt lover.