Carol Doak's Creative Combinations: Stunning Blocks & Borders from a Single Unit

By Carol Doak

“Try Carol’s inspirational quilts projects by learning how to work with unit placement, how to paper piece and how to choose your fabrics.” —Fabrications Quilting for You

Carol Doak is back with something new for paper piecers! Learn how the same rectangular unit can work in dramatically different ways in the blocks and borders of your quilt. If you haven’t tried paper-piecing yet, you’ll discover how quickly and easily your quilt comes together with Carol’s foundation piecing technique. She provides tips for tools and fabrics, plus plenty of inspiration.

Get creative with your own unit combinations—link to online patterns that give you the flexibility to change the size of your quilt, or design your own pattern

“Doak is the doyenne of foundation paper piecing—a quilt-piecing technique that uses a paper foundation for precision stitching of quilt blocks . . . Most of the blocks are beginner friendly, and Doak’s expert guidance helps quilters new to the technique get started . . .This collection will appeal to quilters of all skill levels.” —Library Journal

“Instead of giving designs for square quilt blocks, Carol Doak’s clever concept is to design rectangular paper-pieced units which can then be combined in different ways to make unique blocks or borders. Each unit is presented with multiple design possibilities, reinforcing their versatility.” —Quilters Newsletter

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781607055655

Book preview

Introduction

What started out as an idea for creating foundation-pieced border designs has developed into an exciting way to use rectangular blocks for both border designs and block designs. This simple idea also sparked many creative options along the way.

The Gallery of Double-Duty Units and Corner Squares (page 4) shows all the rectangular blocks that can be used as border designs or block designs as well as corner block units that can turn the corner of a border or be used in a four-block rotation block.

The Creative Border/Block Options chapter shows you many options for using the foundations in this book to create your quilts.

Next, the Tools and Foundations, Fabric, and Paper-Piecing Technique chapters walk you through the mechanics of using paper-foundation piecing to create blocks and quilts quickly and easily.

The Double-Duty Units chapter presents each foundation, providing you with inspiration to create blocks and quilts.

The Quilt Projects chapter provides step-by-step instructions for making the quilts presented in this book. The quilts in this chapter vary in style and size and are just a sampling of the dramatic and fun quilts that can be created featuring the Double-Duty units and corner blocks. All the quilts were made using the full-size Double-Duty foundations (6″ × 12″ finished size) and full-size corner squares (6″ × 6″ finished size). The patternscan be found at http://tinyurl.com/10873-patterns. If you resize the foundations, you will also need to adjust the cut measurements in the cutting list (page 14). You also can add additional borders (pieced or unpieced) to increase the size of your project.

As a quilt designer, I can’t wait to see how you embrace these designs and make them your own through creative fabric and placement choices.

Creative Border/Block Options

Use the Foundations as Borders or Blocks

Inspiration comes in many forms. I have designed more than 1,000 paper-pieced blocks, and the inspiration for these Double-Duty blocks began with the option to print longer foundations on the new Carol Doak’s Legal-Size Foundation Paper. The obvious use of longer foundations would be for quilt border designs. That is where I started, but where I ended up was a complete surprise. I designed a border foundation that was 6″ × 12″ finished size. I then placed the design end to end to see what type of border design it produced.

As one who loves to see what else is possible, I took a block of the border design and rotated another block of the same design and joined them. The end result was a 12″ finished block. But what types of quilt would result from this new block? Fabulous ones! I was amazed to discover many other quilt design options when I manipulated the blocks within the quilt.

6″ × 12″ design using

Double-Duty Unit 8

Resulting border design

12″ finished block

Resulting quilt design

Yet another design results when the blocks are manipulated.

Triangular Units

It wasn’t long before I realized that some of the border foundations offered an additional design option. If I paper pieced only the triangular portion of the designs, I could place those triangles in a four-block rotation. This option is available for Double-Duty Units 6, 9, 11, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22, and 23.

Double-Duty Unit 9 triangular portion

Paper piece only the triangular portion.

Place in a four-block rotation.

The foundations that offer this option have an additional dotted trim line along the outside triangular seam. To use the triangles, cut the pieces that fall within the triangular section and trim the foundation just outside the triangular dotted line to begin the paper piecing. Once all of the pieces have been added, trim the outside edge on the dotted line.

Double-Duty Units 6, 9, 11, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22, and 23 have a separate triangle-option foundation.

All patterns can be found at http://tinyurl.com/10873-patterns

Corner Units

A square of fabric could be used for the corner, but I thought a paper-pieced corner block would be nice also. So I was off to design corner blocks. I made a group of generic-style corners that would fit nicely with the variety of borders I had created. They, too, offered a Double-Duty opportunity because I could use them in a four-block rotation to create a quilt block.

Corner 8

Corner 8 in a four-block rotation

Mix and Match Units

Now, of course, you can use the same Double-Duty foundation throughout the border, but it is fun to play with the possibilities of mixing and matching foundations to create borders. Look for similar