Download the free Lost in the Storm quilt pattern PDF from Robert Kaufman Fabrics. Fourteen pages, finished quilt 60 inches by 60 inches, designed by Shelley Swanland.
The cover of this one carries a line the other free patterns do not: Pattern Level, Advanced Expert, with the note "My skills are sharp, so I'm ready to take on the hard stuff." That is accurate and it is the first thing to say about it. Everything that follows is a description of why.
The quilt is not pieced the way a quilt is normally pieced. Every one of its one hundred and twenty one blocks has a folded piece of fabric trapped inside it, and that folded piece is what you see on the surface: a raised lens shape with soft bias edges, standing clear of the quilt rather than lying flat in it. The Quilter's Bible puts this family under folded patchwork, alongside Cathedral Windows and Secret Garden, and describes what it is for: folding fabrics and layering them together "creates a wonderfully textured look and visually striking designs."
There are three blocks and they are made the same way. Block A takes a six and a half inch square, folded, between four three and a half inch background squares. Block B takes a three and a half inch square, folded, between four two inch squares. Block C takes a shape cut from a printed template, folded, between four two by three and a half inch rectangles.
The making is the interesting part. You fold the center piece in half, sandwich it between two background pieces with the raw edges lined up, and sew. You turn the unit, place the folded piece between two more background pieces, and sew again. Then you open the whole thing out, bring the seam allowances together, and sew the two remaining seams, keeping the allowance between the background squares up and out of the way as you go. Flattened, the unit pulls into a three dimensional square on point with folded bias edges. Four straight seams, no curves, no set in corners, and a piece of fabric that stands up off the quilt.
One instruction in the pattern is in bold and it deserves to be. All the seams press counterclockwise, every block, no exceptions, so that they nest when the top goes together. On a quilt of a hundred and twenty one blocks, pressing one block the other way is a seam that will not sit down later.
Pattern details
- Name: Lost in the Storm
- Brand: Robert Kaufman Fabrics
- Designer: Shelley Swanland
- Finished size: 60" x 60"
- Skill level: advanced expert, printed on the cover
- Blocks: 121 in eleven rows of eleven, in three sizes, each with a folded three dimensional center
- Techniques: folded patchwork, a printed template, mitered borders, bias folds rolled and topstitched by machine
- Fabrics: 29, labeled A to CC, from an eighth of a yard to a yard and three eighths, plus 4 yards of backing
- Binding: three different prints from the materials list
- Pages: 14, including the template
Four things that make this an advanced pattern, and none of them is the piecing
The seams are all straight and all a quarter inch. What raises the level is everything around them.
Twenty nine fabrics, placed on purpose. The pattern opens by telling you to label every fabric A to CC and says that careful placement of specific colors is essential to the look. Then it gives a fabric placement chart, block by block, for all one hundred and twenty one. This is not a quilt where you grab the next piece from the pile. The storm in the photograph, purple on one side moving to deep blue on the other, exists because every block was assigned.
A template, and not a rotary friendly one. It prints at one hundred percent on the last page, gets marked onto the fabric, and the pattern is specific: the outside lines can be cut with a rotary cutter, but the inside angles have to be cut with scissors. Gel pens are what it recommends for the marking.
Mitered borders with a block sewn into them. Three border strips on each side, cut four inches long on purpose because they are mitered at the end. Where two of the border fabrics meet there is a three dimensional triangle sewn into the seam, made exactly like a Block C. Four template pieces are set aside at the cutting stage for this.
A finishing step that is sewing, not quilting. After the quilt is layered and the grid is quilted, every one of those bias folds gets rolled over and stitched down with an open toe foot, a regular stitch length and the feed dogs engaged. The pattern says it in capitals: this is not free motion. It is the same motion The Quilter's Bible describes for Cathedral Window, where you "begin to roll the surrounding border on one side of the window over it, creating a curve," except by machine and a hundred and twenty one times.
The last detail in the pattern is the one that shows the designer has made this quilt more than once. Do not stitch all the way to the point of each fold, because it will pop up later and take on a dimensional look. Sew to the point and you flatten the thing the whole quilt exists for.
Fabrics and palette that suit this construction
The original is made in batiks, and that is not decoration. A folded edge shows the back of the fabric at the roll, so a fabric printed on one side only will flash white where it curves. Batiks are dyed through and read the same on both faces, which is why they suit this technique better than almost anything else. Hand dyed solids and yarn dyed wovens behave the same way. If you want to use regular prints, test one fold first and look at the roll before you cut twenty nine fabrics.
The second thing is value, and the pattern is built on it. Twenty nine fabrics sounds like a scrap quilt and it is the opposite: they run in an ordered sequence from light through mid to dark, and the placement chart puts them where the gradient needs them. If you substitute, substitute within the same value step. A fabric that is one step too light in the wrong corner will read as a hole.
Amounts are small, which helps. Most of the twenty nine are an eighth or a quarter of a yard, a few go to three eighths or half, and only two or three run to a yard or more. The quantities in the original list are tied to Floriculture, a 2015 line that is long gone, so take the SKU list as a record of what was photographed rather than a shopping list.
Thread, and why it matters more here
The pattern asks for cotton threads that match the blocks, so that the stitching holding down the folds is barely visible. That is a real constraint rather than a preference. The stitching sits on the surface of the quilt, on top of a raised fold, in full light. There is nowhere for it to hide, and a thread that is close but not right will outline every one of the hundred and twenty one shapes.
Matching twenty nine fabrics is not practical, so the usual compromise is a handful of threads covering the light, mid and dark ranges, changed as you work across the quilt.
The finishing, worked through
The backing is four yards for a 60 by 60 quilt, which our guide to quilt backing covers along with how to piece it and how much overhang to leave. The binding here is unusual: three different prints from the materials list rather than one fabric, which means three sets of strips joined and used in sequence around the quilt, and machine sewn binding is the method to do it with.
If 60 by 60 is not the size you want, be careful here. This is not a pattern that scales by adding blocks, because the fabric placement chart is the design. Our quilt size chart gives the finished measurements to aim for, and the honest answer for most sizes is to make this one as drawn and choose a different pattern for the bed.
And if this is further than you have gone before, how to make a quilt covers the ground the pattern assumes you already have, which is most of it.
More free patterns are in our free quilt patterns collection, and the ones in this vein are gathered in modern quilt patterns.
