Scrappy Mountain Majesties!

Scrappy Mountain Majesties!
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Easy and Versatile Delectable Mountain blocks from scrap 8.5" squares

This quilt started out as a special guild charity quilt project. A guild member had passed away recently from cancer, and her stash was donated to the guild. I needed to come up with a quilt design that would use these fabrics in a hurry and work out well for a group project. This is what I came up with! These quilts are being donated to the Breast Cancer center in memory of the member who's stash was so lovingly donated for this cause.

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Finished block size: 6"X7.5"
Lap Quilt size approx 60"X70" before quilting.




The large quilt above is 85" X 93"

It seemed that there was more green in the donated stash than anything, so I decided to look for a pattern that would use fabrics in two color ways. Here you see neutrals from white through gold to tan, and various shades of green including some almost-turquoise.

This makes a really nice lap sized quilt. For this size quilt you will need the following:

Assorted light fabrics:
Lap: Cut (32) 8.5" Squares
Full: Cut (66) 8.5" Squares
Assorted dark fabrics:
Lap: Cut (32) 8.5" Squares
Full: Cut (66) 8.5" Squares

You can start by making just one Mountain Majesties block at a time to get the technique down. When you get the idea and the light goes on as to what you are doing, you can easily chain stitch batches and assembly line the steps.

Start by taking two squares, one light and one dark and putting them right sides together. With your ruler and rotary cutter, slice through the two squares from corner to corner.

Chain piece these large 1/2 square triangle units through your machine with a 1/4" seam. Press squares open with the seam towards the dark triangle.

Take the triangle squares to your cutting mat and square them up to 8" square. This is an important step. You COULD cut your original squares at 8 3/8" and perhaps get away without trimming, but I find the larger the triangle squares, the more unwieldy they get no matter how accurate your pressing and sewing is, so I cut them 8.5" and then square up to 8".

When your squares are squared up, layer them one on top of the other, with the dark of the top triangle on top of the light of the bottom. This way you will be sure that you have one 'uphill' block and one 'downhill' block when you are done cutting.

Cut 2" segments through both layers as shown.

carefully peel the top layer off the bottom layer and you will have uphill and downhill strips! Simply rearrange the strips into the Mountain Majesties blocks and stitch together.

Notice that by turning the blocks you can have a dark mountain with a light sky, or a light snowcapped mountain with a dark sky behind it.

There are lots of fun ways to twist and turn these blocks to form many interesting designs. Here are just a few:

Zig Zag Mountains Stacked Lanterns

Mirror Image Mountains Jagged Diamonds

Streak of Lightning*

*Note* for the streak of lightning variation, the quilt is made with all downhill blocks, no uphill blocks at all! So instead if placing your triangle-squares with right sides together, you would stack them one on top of the other both facing up and cut both squares the same way.

To complete the lap size quilt you will need 64 blocks. 32 uphills and 32 downhills. Arrange the blocks in the layout you find most pleasing and stitch the quilt top together. I bordered the quilt with a 2" cut (1.5" finished) inner border of light green, and a 5" cut outter border of a green floral that pulled together the whole quilt top. It is also bound in green. You can easily make more blocks and make this quilt bigger to suit your needs. Just remember that when figuring out how many blocks you will need, that the blocks are longer than they are wide. The blocks finish at 6" X7.5" so keep that in mind. If you make an even number of blocks across and down, the quilt is still going to turn out longer than wide.