I’m very excited to introduce my latest pattern, Scorpio!
While this is the latest pattern I’ve released, it’s in fact the first pattern I designed! 🙂 I designed Scorpio and made the first sample more than a year ago. For quite a while I wasn’t sure how I wanted to quilt it, so the quilt top laid on my guest bed for months waiting for me to get inspired! That all changed several weeks ago when I came up with a vision of straight line quilting that I think complements the patchwork design (scroll down to the end to see my quilting design).
Scorpio is a modern medallion design with ample negative space that allows for any quilting design, walking foot or free motion, to shine! And I, for one, can’t wait to see what you, the creative quilters out there, can do with it!
The central motif of the design is based on a traditional Anatolian kilim (flat-woven rug) motif, called Akrep in Turkish, translated as Scorpion in English. The motif is believed to protect the household from venous scorpions.
Once I created the design, I started thinking about the easiest way to construct the central blocks. Since the design in the middle of the quilt is so central, so eye-catching, it was important to me not to have too many seams showing. So, I wrote the pattern instructions with that goal in mind.
While assembling the central motif blocks, you’ll also be making several half-square triangles (HSTs) on the side. You can use these HSTs either on the triangle borders of Scorpio or in a separate project (for example, in the Bejeweled Table Runner).
Speaking of borders, the pattern includes two versions that differ in the construction of the borders. The one you see above features square border blocks and finishes at 71″ square. This is the original design that I came up with. The other version with triangle border blocks uses the HSTs created in the assembly process and finishes slightly larger at 74″ square. Here is how the two versions compare side by side:
I’d love to hear what you think! Which version do you like better? 🙂
And if you’d like to make a larger Scorpio, you can keep the size of the central motif the same but make the negative space larger!
To keep this short, I’ll just show you a picture of a different sample I made, this time in black and with pieced fabric rather than solids. I’ll talk about that sample in my next blog post, but you can see what it looks like below! I can’t wait to quilt that beauty! 🙂
To get a copy of the Scorpio pattern, please visit the shop or click here.
