During my first trip to Europe, I was dismayed by my first experience with a cathedral. It felt remote and disconnected from its purpose since it no longer served as a house of worship. But then I traveled to Paris. I know you think I going to wax poetic over Notre Dame but you would be wrong. Notre Dame had the opposite problem, which as I discovered was far too common in Europe. Worshipers were pushed aside by rude tourists who kept forgetting that this house served a higher purpose. But I finally found my perfect balance, at the extraordinary Sainte-Chapelle. The shafts of light pouring through those exquisite stained glass windows is a precious memory I will cherish forever.
No surprise, then, that I have been fascinated by the traditional cathedral window quilt patterns. Only one problem. I am lazy. Very, very very lazy. And those things are work. And I don't do work. So when I saw the 10 minute block from Suzanne MacNeill, I knew I had to try it right that minute. Yes, I was that excited by the demo video on YouTube that I got up off the couch and looked for a layer cake to try it out on. I might not have the oomph to take on a "real" cathedral window quilt, but I might be able to do a facsimile. Alas, my stash was bereft of layer cakes. But I did have charm squares. In fact, I still had those charm squares that I was suppose to use (but didn't) on my January quilt from Eleanor Burns' True Blue collection. Well, if the technique can be used on 10 inch squares, I figured I could do it on 5 inch as well. I was right. And Suzanne was right as well. The darn thing was fast. Really, really fast.
Cathedral Addiction had struck. If you haven't seen the technique, it's a four patch with another square folded and stitched into the seams. After I had zipped through 4 four patch units, I started to put them together to create a larger four patch. And I had a brainstorm... what if I put another folded square stitched into the giant four patch? It worked and I had another cathedral window! Then I sewed together 4 giant four patches and did it again. Soon I was blooming cathedrals windows all over the place.
But my little mind keeps rolling and I wanted the windows to extend into the first border. How to do that? Piece that border and treat it like another four patch. Even the border cornerstones were treated that way. Suddenly my border was full of cathedral windows.
Did I mention that it was an addiction?
The addiction was not over. Next I wanted to surround the quilt with a flying geese border that also had curves. I saw a similar trick of folding and stitching a rectangle into a seam between two pieces of fabric to create curved flying geese.
