Monthly Archives: September 2019

Star Rush

Mark this day in history. I made a red quilt.  Or red(ish) quilt.  It’s not totally red, but close.  This is noteworthy because I’m not into red.  It’s not my color.  I don’t wear red, I don’t decorate with red, and I use it very sparingly in my quilts. I know a lot of people love it; I just don’t.  But once in a while you have to get out of your color comfort zone, and that’s what I did.

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I have to start by saying I’m not 100 percent into this quilt.  I think I missed the mark just a bit on my fabric selection.  I wanted to use up some scrap fabric and use what I had in my stash, but (shocking!!!) I don’t have a lot of red fabric.  And my lack of red fabric kind of came back to bite me, but I didn’t realize it until the quilt was pieced together, and I was not going to start over.

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Notice the darker red points on the stars?  Not all of them are as dark as they should be and don’t stand out enough as the corner star pieces.  In a few of them the red fabric is just a bit too light and it doesn’t define the star points enough, in my opinion.

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The fabric I do think I got very right is the strawberry background fabric.  It is the special reprint of the Heather Ross strawberries from her Briar Rose collection.  Even though it’s red, I could use those strawberries all day every day.  Love them.

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My feeling with this quilt is that, it is what it is.  I don’t hate it by any means, it’s just not 100 percent there.  Close, but not quite.  More importantly, it’s a lesson learned that in the future I need to define those star points with darker fabric!

Fantasy

Continuing with my year of making vintage-inspired quilts, I present my latest called Fantasy, named for the Fantasy fabric used in it.

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Fantasy is a new collection from designer Sally Kelly and starts shipping next month.  (You might want to add it you your fabric wish list.)  Windham was nice enough to send me some fabric this summer to try out and I’m completely sold on the collection.

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The use of color immediately caught my attention, and mixed with the different patterns and it’s right up my alley.

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It didn’t take long to decide on a quilt pattern once I saw the fabric.  I’ve had my eye on it for a while and was just waiting for the right fabric to take it on.  I’m not sure what the name of this pattern is but I’ve seen it a couple of places.  Can anyone help?

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Fantasy is perfect for this quilt pattern because it has a small-scale print that works well for cutting smaller pieces like the ones used here.  You can cut it up without losing the overall effect of fabric.

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To break up the busyness of the fabric and add interest to the blocks, I mixed in some of Windham’s Artisan Cotton solids.  Windham recently added new colors to their Artisan Cotton line and many of them coordinate perfectly with Fantasy.

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If you look at the blocks, you’ll see there’s no rhyme or reason for the fabric layout.  This is done on purpose to make it look a bit scrappy, although it’s not scrappy so maybe that’s not the right word.  I guess what I’m saying is that I didn’t want the quilt to be too uniform so I mixed each block up.  The only constant is the red center pieces.  There’s also red triangles mixed throughout the quilt that really stand out because of their dark color, but again, the red triangles mixed throughout are random.

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I love how this quilt turned out.  It’s pretty much how I envisioned it in my head, which sometimes happens and sometimes doesn’t!

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The only downside is that it requires a lot of cutting and sewing, but when you see the finished product it’s all worth it.