by Fiona Carlson
Hey Mama,
Are you ready for a fun little trip down memory lane? I'm so excited to share that the Skate Night Mini quilt pattern is FINALLY HERE!
And... I have an official Skate Night Mini PLAYLIST to share with you, too! Use code PLAYLIST for 15% off your next purchase from my shop!
But before we get to the playlist...
Ok, ok, I'm super super excited to share this playlist with you, but first– I want to share a little bit about my process designing the Skate Night Mini quilt and the meaning behind the name.
I've been really loving fussy cutting lately, so when I was playing with ideas for the Skate Night Mini quilt, I knew I wanted something with lots of squares, i.e. lots of fussy cutting opportunities, and HSTs.
The design started with two simple blocks (shown below).
At the time I was playing with using these blocks in a full quilt. I love Sawtooth Stars and wanted to find a way to include them but rather than being the sole focus of the pattern, I wanted them to be a secondary design. To do this, I colored them as Background fabric, and after playing a little bit with color placement of the other pieces, I landed on this as the full quilt design.
I loved the sort of floral / cross motif as the central focus and the secondary sawtooth stars felt just right.
At the time I was planning to write this full design as a quilt pattern. However, I'd recently suffered a pregnancy loss and wasn't sure I was up for writing and making an entire quilt.
In walks a Bee...
Shortly after this I was asked to join a Quilting Bee! The Bee was already underway, so I would be subbing in for someone who had needed to step away. I was equally excited and terrified. I'd never been in a Quilting Bee before, and how on Earth would I ever decide on a pattern to use as my Bee block?
Well... I realized that the pattern I'd been designing was actually perfect. Lots of Fussy Cutting opportunities, and it would look amazing as a scrappy finish. The only catch, I needed ONE block, not two.
So what did I do? I started cutting away at the cropping until I had one repeating block (see graphic on the left, below)!
The image above (on the right) is the sample Bee block I made to show my worker bees my color palette and how "fussy cuttable" the block was.
The graphic below shows what the full Bee Quilt (48" x 64") layout would look like.
As a whole quilt, the crop would be slightly different on the outer edge than the previous version. But you know what? It actually looked even better, AND the single block would make an awesome mini quilt pattern! Win, win.
This was even more exciting to me than writing up the full pattern (which I now no longer intended or felt the need to do). I was sold. I started writing the mini pattern, and surprisingly it wrote up pretty quickly.
So why Skate Night, and what does that mean?
When I was around 12 or 13, there was an indoor roller skating rink that had regular “teen” nights in my town. It was a safe place for teens to go hang out with friends, make new friends, do a little skating, have some snacks, and maybe make out with someone behind the bleachers.
My twin sister and I would sometimes go with one of our BFFs, and we always had a lot of fun (though it wasn’t ever me doing the making out…lol).
Later, when I was living in Los Angeles in my 20s and 30s I stumbled on a place called Moonlight Rollerway.
It was an old school roller skating rink with 80s vibes that seriously just made my heart SING! I had my birthday party there shortly before Covid, and if I still lived in LA I would totally have made going there a regular thing, because it was seriously the MOST FUN place I’d ever been to.
90s Girl turns 2000s Teen
Being a girl who came of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the last generation without iPhones in high school, those adolescent years just felt so much more simple, innocent, and fun. I miss listening to CDs, recording songs on a cassette tape from THE RADIO, making mixtapes (remember LimeWire??), crushing on boy bands, and living in a world without the constant pull and distraction of cell phones.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPhone. Instagram has been a great resource for my business, I’ve made some great friends, and it’s been (mostly) a lot of fun.
But on the flip side, I find myself checking my phone way more than I’d like– especially around my three-year-old son who really just wants and needs my undivided attention. And that is something that, unfortunately in today’s world, we just rarely get. Being undivided in our attention with friends, family, and loved ones.
When I came up with the design for the Skate Night Mini quilt, for some reason those vibes just jumped out at me. So that’s what I wanted to remind myself of every time I look at my mini hanging on my wall; to simplify, enjoy, and maybe even, just for a little bit, be undivided in my attention with loved ones.
Ok, let's Get to the Playlist!
Alright. So– in the spirit of simpler times and the music that shaped me (us), here is the official Skate Night Mini Playlist!
100 songs to take you back...
To days when everything felt a little more simple, a little more awkward, and let’s be honest… a whole lot more fun.
Skate Night Mini Playlist
On this playlist you’ll find everything from Avril Lavigne (forever the queen of my teen years) to Dream Street (when my obsession with Jesse McCartney started– who happens to be one of my BFFs cousins!), to Letters to Cleo (10 Things I Hate About You anyone?), a little Good Charlotte, Maroon 5, The Postal Service, LFO, Nelly Furtado, Westlife and so many more artists and songs that I had honestly just about forgotten about.
It’s an eclectic collection, for sure, often times feeling very random and not cohesive. But– isn’t that just teenagehood anyway?
So what are you waiting for? Listen in!
I hope you find some songs that brings up some nostalgic and happy feelings for you. And if nothing else, maybe you'll discover some tunes that make you smile.
Until next time!
Xo,
Fiona