The Twister pattern is available in the Flying Parrot Quilts shop!
A while back, as I was thinking about science-themed quilts, I made a list of different scientific disciplines and thought about what kinds of quilts I could make for each of them. For meteorology, I came up with the idea of featuring some the wildest weather out there, tornadoes, and the Twister quilt was born.
Twister is made using improv pieced curves for the funnel clouds, which makes it super fun, and because the height of the funnel is varied, it means there are no seams or corners to match when putting this quilt together! The pattern includes all the instructions you need to get started with improv piecing curves.
This pattern is also great for using up scraps. I used a mix of scraps and fat quarters from my stash to get a nice mix of colors for the sky backgrounds and tornadoes. Fabrics that had droplets or swirly designs for the sky fabrics were great for conveying stormy weather. I also found that ocean-themed prints with wavy lines on them worked well as “rain” when used vertically instead of horizontally! For the clouds, I just used a nice mix of medium to dark gray prints and solids or mottled hand-dye/batik-type prints.
This quilt was quilted on my domestic machine, and was super fun to quilt. I chose a swirly fill for the rain/sky fabrics, and a loopy design reminiscent of a spiral for the funnel clouds themselves. In the upper clouds, I used a scallop pattern which is intended to imitate mammatus clouds. These kinds of scallop-y clouds can appear in conjunction with thunderstorms.
The Twister pattern is available in printed booklet and in PDF form!
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