MavaNell Studio | Celebrate Your Travels with a Quilt

This week I stumbled across some retro travel stickers that I’ve been collecting. Those got me thinking about vacation of course. Anyone else ready for a vacation?

I love traveling. Even when I did it every week for my job, I loved it. There is something thrilling about boarding a plane for a new place. New restaurants to discover. New people to meet. And this is the strangest thing of all maybe – I love hotel rooms. Maybe because I’m not responsible for cleaning it, and it’s always fresh and clean when you return at the end of the day.

Anyway, finding the travel stickers just reminded me of not being able to take a vacation during the pandemic. Then, I got an idea. Why not sew a Travel Quilt as a memento of all the places I had visited or dreamed of going? It seemed like an appropriate way to commemorate a year without vacation – being thankful for all the years we had traveled without restriction and looking forward to our next vacation.

I’ve also been trying to think of a good way to use the Riley Blake Destinations fabric line pictured . So, I decided to design a pattern that used both the travel stickers and the fabric line.

First, I needed to transfer the travel sticker designs to fabric. Then, I fussy cut the fabric to use as the center square in each block.

I searched for a vintage quilt block with a center square that would work for a fussy cut image. (Just an aside, these types of blocks are often referred to as album quilt blocks because the center of the block was used for signatures. Quilts with the signatures of friends or loved ones were often presented as gifts to a newly married couple or a person who was moving and leaving said friends behind.)

As luck would have it, I had been sewing star blocks and had sewn one “backwards”. It turns out that “backwards” block had a name of its own. It is known as the King’s Crown block. The block pattern was published in the Kansas City Star in 1931.

The blocks are made of 4 Flying Geese units, one center square (fussy cut), and four corner squares. I decided to turn my blocks on point just to make the quilt a bit more unique. The entire quilt will measures 57 X 57 inches. The design I came up with is below.