Planning my Temperature Quilt

One of the quilt guilds I belong to recently hosted a Zoom presentation by Jo Avery of the UK on Temperature Quilts. Jo has made several temperature quilts, and she shared all sorts of information and photos of her own quilts, plus those made by many other quilters. Check out her website HERE to see some of them.

Ever since her lecture was scheduled, I've been seriously thinking about making a temperature quilt myself. We even decided to use it as a guild challenge. I've been doing lots of research and planning, one of my favorite parts of quiltmaking. I have purchased a group of fabrics for my quilt, Glaze and Glaze II by Libs Elliott for Andover. I have over 30 different colors, and a few of them will not be included. I also have grey and black as background options. This is my current gradation.

The other decision to be made before January is choosing a block. I've been considering many different designs over the past month or so. I want it to be a block that is easy to make, but not too boring. I don't expect to make my blocks every day; I will probably save up the temperature information and make blocks once a week, or maybe even further apart.

Patty at Elm Street Quilts has made multiple temperature quilts. She shares lots of inspiration and information on how to get started at her page. One of my favorites was her quilt for 2021 (see it HERE.) I decided to try making a few sample blocks.

These blocks certainly met the requirement of being easy to construct. Mine were made with scrap fabrics and a single background instead of varying that fabric too. I like the way they look in Patty's quilt, but they don't really hit the mark for me.

I've seen several temperature quilts made with applique blocks, including circles and orange peels. I love the look of them, but I knew that making a hand appliqued block every day was more than I could handle, and I'm not really set up to do machine applique. Then I discovered this design.

The design is called Wildflower, and it is a free pattern at Andover fabrics. The fabrics in this design are the original Glaze line by Libs Elliott. I like the way those tilted diamonds sort of resemble orange peel blocks, but with straight lines instead of curves. The blocks in the pattern finish at 7", and they are foundation pieced. I needed to scale them down to less than half that size, plus I hoped to avoid the foundation piecing. 

I drew out a smaller-scale block and played around with how to cut the pieces. These were my first sample blocks for this design.

You might notice that the top left diamond is smaller than the others. I'd started by making the other three, then decided to set the diamond back from the corners of the block a bit more. The next samples were made with stash fabrics to approximate the colors I would have used for January 1 - 4, 2024.

Yes, I think that's going to be my block! The design will give my quilt the motion I'm hoping for, with those diamonds tilting up and down. It's interesting how the different color combinations work out some with high contrast and some very low. The blocks will finish at 3". I need to press up my fabrics and maybe do a little precutting, but other than that, I'm ready to get started on my 2025 Temperature Quilt!

Linking up with:

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts

Monday Musings at Songbird Designs

Midweek Makers at Quilt Fabrication

Wednesday Wait Loss at Inquiring Quilter

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA