I went to my annual retreat in Taos recently (my 4th year going to this retreat!). Every year, its an amazing chance to create something…anything, really. I usually bring a few projects with me, and this year I did what I’ve done in years past, brought a few hand sewing projects, and machine sewn projects, so I could choose what to work on and switch back and forth and the mood hit.

This year I decided to try reverse engineering a vintage quilt that my friend Neicy Frey owns. A scrappy, improv mushroom quilt, pictured above. I’ve only ever seen photos, but I have always been in love with the look of it. The mushrooms in the original quilt (above) are each randomly sized, and the block sizes are also a bit random. But what really caught my eye were the caps of the mushrooms. Each of the caps are each one piece of fabric, seemingly sewn to the background fabric as one big curve (this is what it looks like to my eye from studying the photos). I learned quiltmaking under the “rule” of, if you have a curve this steep, it’s best divided into two parts. Otherwise, you risk seam puckers just bad geometry. (Just a side note, I never ever imagined I would use geometry daily as an adult, and yet here we are…) But as hard as I looked at that original quilt, I couldn’t see where the maker did this. Honestly, I kind of love that they just went for it with the full mushroom caps! For some reason, and I love that it’s not cutting the printed fabric of each cap into 2 pieces.

So I decided to try it. There would be no quilters at the retreat to scold me if I screwed it up, and good grief it’s just fabric.

You know what? It wasn’t too bad! It worked (for the most part). Here’s my version-

I cut the mushroom caps and their background fabric in pairs, so there are 2 blocks with the fabrics reversed. I just stacked them, both with right sides up, and using a 28mm rotary cutter, I cut a freehand half circle. No templates, because I wanted them all to be different. (Even if I cut the caps two at a time, I could make the bottom half/stem part of the block different on each one. I tried to pin and sew, but quickly realized that it is best to pin from the center of the cap and work left and right from that. A bit of extra background fabric would extend beyond the mushroom cap on both the left and the right. But other than that, the stitching was smooth. I tried cutting and not cutting the seam allowance of the curves, but honestly couldn’t tell the difference on the front of the block.

I decided to aim for a 10″ square block trimmed/9 1/2″ sewn. So after completing the upper half of the mushroom, I could cut and size the bottom of the block (stem and background) to make the block slightly bigger than 10″, then trim it up to 10″. (By making it a little bigger, I could position the mushroom off center if I wanted to.)

I completed 15 blocks during the retreat, and now that I’m back in my own studio, I can’t wait to keep going. It’s been really fun to work on a project with no reason to be other than I just wanted to try it out. And all “rules” that I’ve ever known (or was told I should know) were not followed at all. And I’ve lived to tell about it!