TURBULENCE

How many of you are scared when there’s a little too much turbulence on your flight? Planes are designed to handle loads way bigger than a little bit of bumpy turbulence, so it’s all perfectly safe. Turbulence covers a lot of different types of instability of the air around the airplane, and can be caused by wind, air pressure, temperature differences, mountains, nearby weather……

Here’s a quick article about three different types of turbulence you might encounter during your next flight. The photo in section 2 is what inspired my quilting for this block! I had plans to do some FMQ to get it really crazy, but life happens.

Materials:

16” x 16” (ish) piece of batting
16” x 16” (ish) backing fabric
From the background fabric:
- B: 5.25” x 10.75”
- C: 16” x ~7” DON’T CUT YET!!!!
- E: 7”ish x 16”? **
- F: 7”ish x 16”?**
- **Read the whole post before you cut anything! Debbie has a fantastic tutorial on Improv Spikes that you can follow to help with this block!
From accent fabric:
- A: 5.25” x 5.75″
- D: 5” x 16”

Sewing:

Okay, full disclosure. I don’t really do improv, and I don’t enjoy not knowing how to do the math for the angles of this mountain. Luckily for me, the lovely and wonderful Debbie @aquilterstable has a tutorial on making improv spikes, which would make an amazing mountain!

Here’s a link to her very well written tutorial on improv spikes. Try to make an improv spike that’s 5” x 16”. If it’s bigger or smaller, it’s no big deal, that’s why we didn’t cut piece C right away!

http://aquilterstable.blogspot.com/2017/09/improv-spikes.html

Sew together pieces A and B on the short edge!

Sew your improv spike (DEF) onto piece AB!

Now is the time when you can figure out how big you should cut piece C. It’ll be 16” tall, since that’s how big our block is. But how wide should it be?? Measure your A-B-improv-spike block. Take that number, and subtract it from 16.5” (the extra half inch accounts for (2) quarter inch seams). That’s X. So cut your background fabric piece C to 16” x X”.

Sew your background piece C to the A-B-Improv-stripe piece, and the piecing is done! I used the photos of airflow over a mountain to inspire my quilting, and did some walking foot quilting. If you want to be really ambitious, some spirals would look really amazing on the right of the mountain.

Can’t wait to see what you come up with! Let me know if you have any questions! @itskimsinsta on the Instagram!