Tag Archives: Rainbow Quilt

Rafter

July 13, 2020UncategorizedRainbow Quilt, Scrap Quilt, Tula PinkBrooklyn Quilting Co.

Sometimes I have a quilt idea in my head and I miraculously manage to execute it exactly how I was thinking, without making adjustments along the way. This is one of those times. It took some planning but I did it.

Rft 5

This quilt utilizes two of my favorite things: rainbow colors and scraps. Yes, your read that right, this is actually a scrap quilt.

Rft 3

Every piece of fabric, minus the purple Tula Pink Fairy Dust fabric, is all scraps.

Rft 4

I think many of us quilters have white fabric laying around, and then it was only a matter of digging through my scrap bag to pull ROYGBIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) colors to get the rainbow look. This is why I save small scraps! For projects like this. Plus, I hate wasting fabric so I always have a healthy scrap bag ready to go.

Rft 8

I am planning to write a whole blog post about my scrap quilting process, which I kinda take pride in because I have a philosophy of leaving no scrap behind. That blog post is coming in the near future, but back to this quilt.

Rft 2

The only fabric I had to buy was the Tula Pink Fairy Dust, which I wanted to get anyway. From the minute I saw it I knew I had to have it, and I think it is perfect for this quilt.

Rft 6

Tula has since come out with more color options for Fairy Dust, and so many of them would work, but I’m partial to the purple.

Rft 1

With all of the colors happening on the front, I need to start thinking about the back. Not sure which direction I’m going to go yet, but I feel like it needs to be Tula on the back as well. Thoughts?

Friends On The Way – Finished

December 12, 2018UncategorizedDenyse Schmidt Fabric, Quilt Pattern, Rainbow QuiltBrooklyn Quilting Co.

Is there anything happier than a rainbow? I think not! That’s why I love making rainbow quilts; they’re just so fun and easy to make.

I say easy to make because you don’t have to spend a lot of time picking your fabric, planning the layout or worrying about the order of blocks. Just follow the rainbow!

This quilt is all about them scraps. In fact, I put it together with the sole purpose of using up a bunch of leftover triangles I had cut for a different project. The patterned fabric triangles are all Denyse Schmidt prints. These are combined with solids.

In this quilt, none of the Denyse Schmidt triangles repeat but some of the solid colors do and some don’t. Like the patterned triangles, I wanted to use up as many solid scraps as I could. In some cases, I had enough solid fabric in one color but a lot of them I didn’t. This really was about using and using up what I had. I kind of like the mix of the different shades of one color family.

For the back, like the front, I pieced together a print and solids.

The floral print was the starting point and came from a large piece of fabric I had in my stash. I have no idea what it is except that it’s a cotton lawn. I randomly picked it up at a hole-in-the-wall fabric place here in Brooklyn and it ended up matching perfectly with the scrap pieces of Artisan Cottons in green and purple.

In keeping with the Denyse Schmidt fabric theme, the binding on this quilt is also DS Fabric. It’s an old print of hers from Joann’s.

This quilt pattern is now available for purchase. I have listed it in my Etsy shop and you can DOWNLOAD THE PATTERN HERE.

Rainbow Scrap Quilt

November 20, 2017UncategorizedRainbow Quilt, Scrap QuiltBrooklyn Quilting Co.

This year is quickly coming to an end and I have made major headway sewing down my scrap bag in 2017. And oh, does it feel so good. There’s nothing like the satisfaction of seeing my overflowing scrap bag – or maybe I should say scrap bags – dwindle down.

Today is one of those days where I get to share a scrap bag turned scrap quilt success story. What started as a flicker of an idea in my head turned into this:

I started this one weekend in August thinking I would throw together a quick project, but it ended up being bigger and more time consuming than I had planned on. Once I started, I realized I needed to make the quilt larger to really show off the rainbow spectrum of colors. It was worth the time and effort.

I’m going to write a whole blog post about how to make a good scrap quilt, but in the meantime here’s a little tip: When combing scraps from different collections that otherwise wouldn’t mesh, put them in color order. Red, orange, yellow, green blue, indigo and violet (ROYGBIV). That’s what I did with this quilt and it worked.

Sometimes when you try combining scraps from different designers/manufacturers they can look like a mess; they just don’t go together. But when you put them in rainbow order…voila!

Works like a charm every time.

Plus, who doesn’t love a rainbow?!?!

That’s it for this week but I’ll see you back here after Thanksgiving. I’m working on my 2017 holiday gift guide and I can’t wait to share it with you.

Friends On The Way

April 10, 2017UncategorizedDenyse Schmidt Fabric, Rainbow Quilt, Scrap QuiltBrooklyn Quilting Co.

I have officially deemed this year the year of ‘using what I have.’ I know it’s already April, but I have been living this theme since January; I just haven’t put it into writing until now. I mentioned it in my last blog post and I am sticking with it. 2017 is all about using the fabric I have instead of buying more fabric, or at least buying as little fabric as possible.

So far it’s going well and has me thinking creatively, like the scrappy triangles I put together for my Stonington quilt. That’s a good thing. Sometimes your best work comes from having limited options instead of unlimited ones.

So on that note, I introduce my latest ‘using what I have’ quilt.

This is one of the scrappiest quilts I’ve ever made. And I mean I was really digging through my pile of solid colored scraps to come up with the right (or as close to right as possible) solids to bring it all together.

I wanted to do a rainbow quilt and was pretty sure I had a whole rainbow of solid scraps to make that happen. And I did! But the solids are not perfectly matchy matchy.

If you look closely, there are varying shades of color for some of the smaller solid triangles. The pink, the purple, the blue and the yellow all have different shades. That’s because I didn’t have enough scraps to make them the same.

I actually think the different shades work and I’m pretty happy with that look.

Another good thing about this quilt is that it didn’t take me long to make it, because almost half of the triangles were already cut.

There’s a years long Denyse Schmidt quilt I’m working on that has me accumulating leftover triangles. (I really should write about that project but more on that another time.) Anyway, that multi-year Denyse Schmidt quilt means I have A LOT of DS fabric. Like boxes of her fabric. And I want to use this fabric, but first I wanted to use some of those triangles I had already cut.

Being able to dig into that pile of already-cut triangles had me feeling pretty proud of myself for using some of them up.

So what do you think? Given that a lot of this fabric literally came from the bottom of the bin, I don’t think it’s too shabby.

I’m now off to dream up new quilts using my stash. Have a great week!

UPDATE: This quilt pattern is now available for download in my Etsy Shop. You can DOWNLOAD THE PATTERN HERE.

Cut & Run – Finished

May 25, 2016UncategorizedDenyse Schmidt Fabric, Flying Geese Quilt, Liberty of London, Liberty of London Tana Lawn, Rainbow QuiltBrooklyn Quilting Co.

It’s done! And I love it. The bright colors, the flying geese, the Liberty of London back…it all works for me.

As I was deciding how to quilt this one, I chose to do some really dense quilting. This is probably the densest quilting I’ve ever done and I am really happy with it. It looks great and gives the quilt lots of good texture.

That’s what I’m talking about!

After I finally got this quilt headed in the right direction (see earlier post where my original idea failed), I knew I wanted to use a piece of Liberty of London cotton lawn I have been hiding away for the back. If you’ve ever worked with Liberty cotton lawns, you know how soft and silky they feel and how great they are to work with. Pretty much heaven.

The piece I had was just wide and long enough to fit, but let me tell you I cut it close. Like real close. I barely had anything to trim off when I was squaring it up, but I’m going to call that a good use of fabric. Zero waste!

So now I can call this one done and list it in my Etsy shop. For a quilt that I hadn’t planned on, this one really worked out well. Funny how that happens sometimes.

I’m now off to work on a new project that I can’t wait to tell you about. More to come.

Cut & Run

February 15, 2016UncategorizedDenyse Schmidt Fabric, Flying Geese Quilt, Rainbow QuiltBrooklyn Quilting Co.

This is one of those quilts that started out as something completely different than what I ended up with.

Originally, I had an idea sketched out on graph paper that I thought was going to be great! I got my fabric together, started cutting and laying the blocks out, but a couple of hours in it wasn’t coming together how I envisioned. I should have stopped right there, but I was determined to make it work so I kept going. Bad, bad idea!

These were the original blocks I started with.

I went on to waste way too many hours cutting fabric before I finally admitted to myself it wasn’t going to work, so I pulled the plug on it.

I then proceeded to spend a couple of days annoyed with myself before I finally regrouped and tried to salvage as many of the blocks as I could. I did a little brainstorming, sorted through some scraps of solids, and finally came up with this.

Because I was trying to use as many of the blocks that I had previously cut, I decided to try and use as many of the solid scraps that I had, too. This quilt became an effort to scrape something together from a bunch of castaway fabric.

For not having planned this, it turned out much better than I thought it would. Funny how that works sometimes.

I should mention that all of the fabric – minus the solids – is Denyse Schmidt fabric. I still have a lot of leftover squares from the original quilt I planned to make, but I’m confident one day they will find their way into something.

Also, I haven’t completely given up on the original quilt I sketched out. I still think it could work with some minor edits. I think it’s about 90 percent there.

Back to the drawing board!