Millenium Pyramids!

Millennium Mania!

~My 1999 Y2K Quilt Adventure~

*NOTE* This 1999 tutorial was moved to my blog from my original website. It’s been so many years since this all began. 

My Millennium Pyramids quilt now lives with my sister Joy and her family.

Original text from 1999:

I have been bitten!! And bitten HARD! When I first heard of the millennium quilt craze and the whole prospect of creating a quilt with 2000 different pieces of fabric to celebrate the dawning of a new century, I thought it was INSANE!! *LOL*

But then, when has insane ever stopped me? 

Through the help of internet swap lists I discovered how fun it is to swap packets of 25 different 3" charms along with a signature square (siggie!) and a bio (biography) with quilters from around the world.

I don't know exactly how many swaps I have sent out,(over 150 so far!) and how many I have received, but it has been so fun to receive "squishies" in the mail every day.

I thought and thought about what kind of quilt I wanted to make with these charms. I surfed websites to more websites and was really inspired by the quilts I saw out there......but I wanted mine to be different.

My biggest challenge is that though quilters try the best they can....the squares I have been receiving are NOT all an exact 3" square. Sooooo...they would have to be evened up some how so that the pieces would be uniform and all fit together right.

Then it hit me! The perfect pattern! I am doing my quilt with equilateral triangles, and calling it 2000 Pyramids!

Click HERE for Printer-Friendly PDF.

                                   

 Of course this is just a small section...but if you look very closely (and squint a bit! *LOL*) you can see that the darks and the lights form a zig zag design across the quilt.

I have separated my light patches from my dark patches and even turned the medium prints upside down to use the reverse side....giving me more lights....

I am stitching 40 rows of 50 triangles to give me my 2000 pieces.....borders not included! I have no clue what I will do when it comes to borders, but I will deal with that when I get there. So far I have 350 pieces sewn together. Not a small accomplishment in itself, but still SO FAR to go!  Quilt directions: This pattern is NOT as hard as it seems! The hardest part was graphing out the color placement to get the zig zag effect. That can be done easily on triangle graph paper, found at most quilt shops. I take the 3" squares and seam two of them together with a 1/4" seam along one edge.... I chain sew a bunch of these pairs together.

  
...and then with my triangle rule  Place the 2.5" line on the seam line of the joined pairs.....and cut the triangle.  Because of the seam, I can open these up and have diamond shapes.  Simply stitch the diamonds into rows and stitch together! 

When joining rows......it is very important to pin your points so that they match when you stitch your seam. 

Update!! I spent Super Bowl Sunday Night adding another 150 pieces to my quilt...here is a pic! This brings the total of pieces so far to 650!


650 triangles

It's Finally Finished! I finally finished this quilt at a quilter's retreat with my quilt guild up in Oklahoma! I even found the PERFECT border fabrics while we were out haunting the quilt shops. I used a red for a narrow inner border, and found the perfect purple/turquoise/red print for the outer border to tie it all together! Now to get it quilted.....maybe in the NEXT Millennium?

As I mentioned at the top of this tutorial, the original text was moved from my first website written in 1999 when I was writing about Millennium quilts and swaps, and this quilt that I made during that time.

I finished the quilt sometime after the year 2000.

In July of 2017 I attended the LAST family reunion I would get to spend with my brother Mark before he passed.

Quilts were made to cover picnic tables. Quilts were made for memory making. Use the quilts. 

Everywhere.  All the time.