Early on in my quilt design journey I wanted to make a quilt for my best friend that linked back to the many wonderful mountain hikes and trips we’ve done together. A quick sketch gave me the general idea of what I wanted to create (and even how I wanted to quilt it!) but figuring out how to make it took quite a while as I hadn’t designed a complicated foundation paper pieced pattern (FPP) before. Not one to shy away from a challenge I jumped in and made LOTS of mistakes before finally figuring out how to make the templates I needed. Fast forward to seeing it hanging in the Festival of Quilts 2019 and having to give it to my friend, and I’ve had the nagging desire to properly write up the pattern and make one just for me ever since. There’s been quite a few false starts between then and now, but 2022 is finally the year it happened!

An intermediate Foundation Paper Piecing pattern inspired by the peaceful moments of reflection found during hikes in the Scottish mountains, Mountain Reflections tries to bring a little of that calm back to the hustle and bustle of modern life. With 80 pages of FPP templates, the pattern is packed with lots of helpful tips and clear diagrams on how to assemble your top with ease. It is also written to be Fat Quarter and yardage friendly, but it’s totally suitable for scraps so you can go wild and put your own spin on it!

Choosing my fabrics

This pattern really lends itself to ombré effects and I had a lot of fun mixing and matching shades to build my perfect gradient.

For my friend’s quilt I shopped in person at my LQS so that I could find a colour combination I was happy with. I didn’t often note the names of fabric back then (I’m trying to be more diligent now but let’s just say it’s a work in progress), but amazingly I seem to have documented this quilt with more attention to detail than usual! The Mode Bella colours I used are:

• Sky = White Bleached (probably - I don’t have this one noted down with the others for some reason!)

• Snow = Porcelain

• Green 1 - 5 = Green Tea, Betty’s Green, Grass, Evergreen, Christmas Green

• Blue 1 - 5 = Baby Blue, Dusk, Night Sky, Royal, Nautical Blue

For my second version I went for slightly brighter tones and used Kona Cotton since I have their fabric colour chips and could play around with them until I got just the right gradient while being stuck at home. The colours I used are:

• Sky = Sky (very appropriately named!)

• Snow = White

• Green 1 - 5 = Honey Dew, Pear, Sour Apple, Clover, Willow

• Blue 1 - 5 = Lake, Algeria, Cyan, Pacific, Riviera

Here are the all fabric requirements to get you started - based on fat quarters and fat eighths, these are intended to give you an indication of how much fabric you’ll need in total. If you’re going scrappy or mixing and matching your colour placement then you might need more of some colours - feel free to go wild!

Piecing

There are lots of reasons to love FPP, but my absolute top one is how super precise it is. Like many quilters I have a slight fear of Y-seams and FPP is the perfect way of creating those fun irregular angles without the headache (and heartache) of trying to turn a corner mid seam and needing to unpick it time after time.

I also love that with FPP it’s really easy to do just a little bit at a time as the mood strikes and not have to worry about remembering which part of the pattern you were working on the next time you sit down at your machine. So many of the templates for both of my versions of this pattern were sewn in dribs and drabs with a hot vat of tea (or on one occasion with a glass of something stronger!) and it was so easy to chip away at the mountains without really noticing.

Top Tip

Make sure you have a seam roller! Getting up and down to use the iron for every seam would have driven me crazy and my trusty seam roller was an absolute life saver. You can get plastic versions of these from the various big sewing brands, but I prefer my wooden one that is actually meant for smoothing wallpaper seams and came from a hardware store.

Quilting

As you can see from my initial sketch of this design, I had some quite strong ideas about how I wanted to quilt it from the get-go! I quilted irregular contour lines in the green mountains using a mix of 40wt Aurifil threads (2892, 2884 and 2886) and after auditioning a few different thread options I went with wiggly wave lines for the water using 40wt Aurifil 2740. The clouds in the sky were traced using my partner’s conveniently cloud shaped tape dispenser that was just the right size and quilted using 40wt Aurifil 2021. If I was doing this again I might add some more detail to the sky as it’s a little bare, but at the time this whole quilt was really stretching my skills and I’m pleased with the overall effect.

In keeping with the crystallised/fractured look of the design I opted for scrappy binding, but matched it to the colours of the water, mountains and sky to make it somewhat seamless. If I’d know about faced binding at the time I probably would have opted for that, but I love how this came out. This was my first time trying a hand finished binding (I was only taught machine binding) and if you’ve been here for a while you’ll know that I was immediately hooked and now finish 99% of my quilts by hand. I just love that clean “professional” finish!

I’m less decided on how I want to quilt my second version, and might need to sit with it for a while before committing to a design. I think I’ll go for a faced binding this time though to give it a really crisp finish that will be perfect for hanging in my hallway - living in the flat English Fens really makes me miss mountains and I have pictures of them all over my house!

Make it your own with some colour inspiration

One of my favourite things about designing patterns is just how different they can look with different colours! I know how much you all love switching up colours in patterns too, so I had a little play and came up with some colourways to inspire you. Still looking for more inspiration? Don’t forget to check out my tester parade and the #MountainReflectionsQuilt hashtag to see some of the amazing fabric pulls my testers came up with. Feel free to go scrappy too - the suggested colour order is really more of a suggestion than a hard and fast rule.

And there you have it - the Mountain Reflections quilt!

You can get your own copy of the pattern now by clicking the button below. Remember, I absolutely love to see your makes, so don’t forget to share your projects with #MountainReflectionsQuilt and #CaitLisleDesigns hashtags!