Download the free Fiori di Trieste quilt pattern PDF from Robert Kaufman Fabrics. Twelve pages, finished quilt 90 inches by 94 inches, with three colorstories shown.
This one is built around a panel, and that is the part worth understanding before you decide whether to make it. The panel is not a centerpiece here. It is trimmed to 40 1/2 inches, cut in half across its width, and the two halves run along the top and bottom of the quilt like a pair of printed bands. Everything else is pieced around them.
The layout is a medallion. Six large blocks fill the center, three rows of two, each one eighteen inches finished and built from nine six inch units: a square in a square at the middle, four units with one snowballed corner and four with two, which together read as a flower rather than as nine squares. A column of five sawtooth stars runs down each side, twelve inches finished, each star with a nine patch center made from strip sets rather than cut squares. Then the panel bands, then two borders.
The flying geese are made four at a time by the no waste method, a 7 1/4 inch square with four 3 7/8 inch squares, which is exactly the arithmetic The Quilter's Bible gives for a 3 by 6 inch finished unit. Nothing in the pattern needs a template and nothing needs a set-in seam, but the borders are cut along the length of the fabric rather than across it, so the yardage has to be laid out before the rotary cutter comes near it.
Robert Kaufman gives no designer name on this one and no difficulty rating. The PDF is from 2015 and the fabric line is Fiori di Trieste. The three colorstories are Jewel, Sunset and Onyx, with full fabric lists for each on pages 9 to 12.
Pattern details
- Brand: Robert Kaufman Fabrics
- Finished size: 90" x 94", queen
- Skill level: intermediate
- Blocks: an 18 inch block of nine six inch units, and a 12 inch sawtooth star with a nine patch center
- Techniques: flying geese four at a time, strip piecing, snowball corners, square in a square, working with a panel
- Fabrics: seven, plus a panel and 4 1/4 yards of backing
- Precuts: none, this one is cut from yardage
- Pages: 12, with three colorstories
What a panel asks of the rest of the quilt
A printed panel is already a finished design. Put it next to busy piecing and the two fight, and the panel usually loses, because the eye reads pieced shapes faster than it reads a print. This pattern handles that by keeping the panel at the edges and giving it a plain frame, and by making the center blocks large and open.
That is the rule worth taking away if you want to use a panel you already own, and it is more useful than the yardage list, because Fiori di Trieste has not been in production for years. Give the panel room. Frame it in something quiet. Let the piecing be bolder than the panel, not busier than it.
The measurements are the other thing to check. This pattern wants a panel that finishes 11 1/2 by 40 1/2 inches after being cut in half, so roughly 23 by 40 before cutting. A panel of a different size does not stop you using the pattern, but it changes the width of the quilt center, and everything downstream of it moves.
Fabrics and palette that suit this construction
Seven fabrics, and the jobs are not equal. Two of them do the heavy work: the teal that fills the center blocks and the gold that makes the star points and the sashing, and those two are what the quilt reads as from across a room. They need to be quiet enough to hold a lot of area. A tone on tone or a small texture works better here than a large print, which gets cut into six inch squares and loses its pattern. Our solid fabrics are the safe end of that, and a near solid does the same job with a little more life in it.
The star points want contrast against the star background, not against each other. The nine patch centers are the one place a busier print earns its keep, because they are small and they are framed.
If you are building this from your own shelves rather than from a line that no longer exists, the substitution to get right is the background, not the feature print. This pattern is cut from yardage and not from precuts, so the two background fabrics want a yard and a half and three yards respectively, which is fabric by the yard territory rather than a bundle.
One tool note, because this pattern is unusual in this respect. The outer borders are cut along the length of the fabric rather than across the width, one of them 86 1/2 inches long. A cut that long is only as straight as the blade doing it, and a blade that skips leaves a wobble you will be easing in for the rest of the quilt. A fresh blade in the rotary cutter is worth more here than on any other cut in the pattern.
The blocks in this pattern, worked through
Two of the units here have guides of their own. The flying geese method this pattern uses, along with two others and a size chart for every finished size, is in how to make flying geese quilt blocks. The nine patch centers are made from strip sets, and how to make a nine patch quilt block has the cutting chart in nine sizes and the arithmetic behind the strip set.
More free patterns are in our free quilt patterns collection.
