Tumbler Flag

A couple Fridays ago, the Missouri Star Quilt Company (MSQC) had a tutorial for the Tumbler Flag wall hanging.  (Every Friday they have a new YouTube tutorial for a project.  They are very well done, and I've gotten way too many projects on my to-do list because of them!)  This was a version of the American flag made with tumblers cut from charm squares (which are 5" square).  I wanted to make my own wall hanging for the Fourth of July but felt that the 5" charms were too big for what I had in mind.

I figured that if I used 5" tumblers, by the time my flag got to 13 stripes and was proportional, it wouldn't fit on the wall I had in mind.  Early in the morning of June 20, 2015 (the day after the tutorial came out) an idea came to me (I get my best ideas in the middle of the night!).  I decided to use mini tumblers (nice that I already had the template from MSQC!).  (NOTE:  tumblers are NOT square, and my drawing was not exactly proportional to a real flag!  I had to leave off six columns of the red and white stripes, and I think I also had to change the blue rows.)

Around 10 that morning, I started digging out the reds, blues and whites and cut out about a bazillion tumblers (or a few hundred).  There were a few breaks in between, but by 10 that night, the top (except for the border) was done!  In the tutorial, the tumblers were cut flat at the top and bottom of the flag before the border was added.  However, I liked how the tumblers made the flag appear to be waving in the breeze and felt that chopping it off might spoil that look.  And of course I thought of this AFTER it was all sewed together.  So out came the ripper (I call mine Jack--get it?), and I had to rip the end of the seam between each column to add a tumbler of border fabric.  Then after I sewed the columns back together, I cut those rows flat and added a strip of border fabric.  I chose a light blue Stonehenge fabric to look like the sky.

My goal was to finish the whole works (piecing, quilting, binding, hanging sleeve) by the end of June.  I did it--finished it last night!  Start to finish:  11 days--that's pretty fast for me, especially since it took almost 20 years to finish my first quilt.

Here it is on my living room wall:

I did echo quilting on the stripes and quilted a star in each of the blue tumblers.  It's not entirely accurate (since there are 56 stars!), but I like it.