I made my first American flag quilt during the summer of 2002, when I was getting back into quilting after a hiatus. You see, I started to quilt when I lived in Chicago and did it usually during bad-weather weekends, often while watching a Bears game on TV. But when I moved to L.A. in 1997, rarely was there a bad-weather weekend (and even fewer Bears games were televised), so my quilting fell by the wayside. I had to learn to quilt while it was nice outside and without the Bears.
That year, my Fourth of July plans had fallen through at the last minute, so I was home and caught an episode of “Simply Quilts,” a show that used to run on HGTV. Since it was the holiday weekend, they ran an episode featuring a quilter and her design for an American flag quilt. I thought that I could do a better American flag quilt design, so pulled out graph paper, a pencil & a ruler and designed my own interpretation. Once I had it on paper -- and was facing a weekend with no plans -- I thought, “Well, I might as well make it.” And thus ended my five-year quilt-making hiatus. I was back into the thick of it.
I made my second flag, "Flag #2", in a smaller size and changed the way I made the red and white stripes, employing the time honored rail fence quilt pattern.
Then, with "Flag #3", I kept the rail fence stripes the same and changed the stars in the field of stars. This time I used Jan Mullen's "Slender Starz" pattern to make the 13 stars that, to me, appear to dance.
I then tweaked the design again with "Flag #4", spacing the stars a bit farther apart, filling the space of the field better. When that quilt sold, I made it two more times -- "Flag #5" and "Flag #6".
"Flag #7," is a rework of my original "Flag" quilt design. The look is the same, but this one is one-quarter the size and I streamlined the pattern to make the construction more straight forward. I also increased the contrast among the elements of the “white” stripes so that the lower half of the stars shapes in the stripes would be more apparent.
"Flag #8," is a rework of my original "Flag #2" quilt design. I made this after "Flag #2" sold, to use as a sample for the quilt workshops I teach.
And I made "Flag #9," to replace "Flag #6" after it sold, to also use as a sample for the quilt workshops I teach.
I needed to make made "Flag #10” to use as a back-up sample, when I had two Flag #4 workshops scheduled in the same month. And after all the star-making demos I did in those two workshops, I made Flag #11.
Then in August of 2019, while contemplating ideas for a herringbone quilt for my annual Christmas Card quilt, I wondered if I could make a U.S. flag quilt using the herringbone pattern. “A New Slant on Old Glory,” my 12th flag quilt, was the result.
There were two reasons to make “Flag #13.” First, I needed a back-up sample for my Flag #2 workshop. And second, I had a lot of scraps of patriotic fabrics from making more than 100 face masks during the national shut-down for the Covid-19 pandemic. What better project to make with patriotic fabric scraps than a flag quilt?
The American flag is such an iconic image, hence my interest in making it over and over again.
