Have you looked at Fave Quilts?

At the start of the year I got a lovely email from Jessica from Fave Quilts saying that they had featured one of my patchwork tutorials on their web site. Fave Quilts is a great resource if you are into patchwork and quilting. Lots of links to resources and ideas. They also do a newsletter, so go ahead and sign up to it.

The one that they featured was the Sixteen Patch Baby Quilt. The result has been a rise in the hits of my blog (but not comments .. what is going on!).

It was great to get feedback from someone about what I blog about, as often it feels like you are putting it out there and no-one is reading it (although the stats say a different story).

So have you tried our tutorial?

Can you take a few minutes to give me some feedback?

Vintage print Baby Quilt

I grabbed one of the Jelly Rolls that Spotlight had on sale this week, VIP customers of course. The rolls are $30 reduced to $20, 25 strips of 2.5 inch wide strips.

Until now, all I have sewn with has been Moda Jelly Rolls; High Quality stuff. Unfortnately, these rolls are not quite on the same level. The material is a bit thin, the 2.5 inch width is skewed at the start and middle of the sash and I am a bit nervous how it will wash up. The label says to pre-wash the fabric.

The quilt is for a friend who is due in about 4 weeks, not sure what she is having, so it needed to be something gender neutral. I decided to do an off centre block, inspired by Oh! Fransson of course! When cutting and pressing, the fabric was a bit difficult to work with. Not as easy at the moda pre-cuts. I am going to try and do some postage stamp blocks to see how it handles with interfacing.

I sashed the blocks in a high thread count white. I am going to try and find a complimentary print for the back of the quilt and I have some light blue strips strips for the bias.

Patchwork Design: Playing with colours

How do you go about matching your fabric colours for your quilts?

I recently got some jelly rolls through from the Fat Quarter shop (A Breath of Avignon and Happy Campers Moda Jelly Rolls) when they had their sale. I love the idea of jelly rolls, all the hard work of matching, measuring and cutting all done by someone else.

I quickly unraveled one of them and started to play around with the strips of fabric. Weaving one after another, playing with colours and prints.

Some of the monochromatic prints in these bundles will go into Tori's Quilt.I just love the warmness of this mustard!

When I was finished playing around with the prints, I then blocked the woven strips with a nice red that was in the jelly roll and stood back to see if the combination would work.

The browns in the middle seem to be the dominant colour when I squint my eyes the greens also pop out, so the colour combinations need a bit more work. And I think I still have to put some spiders and bats in there somehow. I am hoping that I can do a few baby quilts with these jelly rolls.

How do you design your patchwork colour scheme?