Storm at Sea Quilt Pattern

Tools to make quilt designing easier...

Click any image for more information, reviews, and pricing.

Electric Quilt 8 for Mac and PC

Quilter's Fabricalc

No Math Quilt Charts & Formulas

Also available from Amazon.

Create a design within a design

In this first example, we've created a heart by coloring the appropriate patches red. Use this idea to add a little love to your next quilt!

4 x 4 blocks

Use the same 'heart' idea, but now make them interlocking. The bottom part of the Storm at Sea quilt block is missing from the last row of this 5x5 block design to create a symmetrical layout.

Almost 5x5 blocks

Now change up the colors to create a diamond shape...

4 x 4 blocks

...and then add more color.

4 x 4 blocks

A pocketful of posies is easy to imagine...

5 x 5 blocks

...or even a whole meadow.

5 x 5 blocks

Storm at Sea quilt pattern as a background

Up until now, our versions of the Storm at Sea quilt pattern have used high contrasting fabrics.

Now we'll reduce the contrast in the blocks so that they can create a unified background for our quilt designs.

Set the blocks on point, replace some of the small 'square in a square' quilt blocks with solid squares and a school of fish appears to swim its way across your quilt top.

2 x 2 blocks

Keeping the reduced contrast, why not create ribbons of undulating color. This is a great place to use some of those hand-dyed gradations you've got tucked away.

4 x 4 blocks

Take it to the next level!

In this final set of design inspirations, we use the same block layouts we've used previously, but now the block is totally transformed and looks nothing like the traditional Storm at Sea quilt pattern.

Over and under and under and over, these colorful ribbons are intertwined.

5 x 5 blocks

Back to highly contrasting fabrics, a change in color placement and alternating circles emerge.

5 x 5 blocks

Don't worry about the Quilt Police!

They don't really exist!

The Quilt Police can't stop you from swapping out portions of your Storm at Sea quilt pattern for something else.

Here we've gone back to a traditional blue and white coloring of the quilt.

But somehow, it's different...

6 x 6 blocks

Can you see what we did?

Snail's Trail quilt block

I'll give you a clue. This is a straight set quilt layout.

Did you find the change?

We replaced the larger 'square in a square' unit in the Storm at Sea quilt block with a 'snails trails' block like the one shown to the right.

The extra pieces of the Snail's Trail block add to the visual intricacy of the design...but not the skill needed to piece it.

Way back in 2012 when I first published this page, I'd never seen this combination before.

9 years later you see it a lot.