I have a friend from my Church who is a wonderful artist and designer. Her name is Karla and she specializes in repeat designs, having several wallpaper lines and also a number of other great designs on the market. You can check out her blog here.
Well, she and her husband are having a baby girl. As a matter of fact, she is at the hospital RIGHT NOW!!! So exciting!!
When I told Karla that I wanted to make her a quilt, she said that she had two yards of fabric printed at Spoonflower and would I like to use it in the quilt. It is a wonderful repeat design with fun colors and I was really excited to work with it……
I started out by picking other fabrics to go with this one…..
I had been considering patterns. Karla likes more traditional designs so I was thinking about a pinwheel quilt, however, when I got the fabric, I felt like the scale of the print was too large to cut into a lot of smaller pieces so I got onto EQ and started playing.
I came up with this idea and thought that it would be perfect…..
However, when I started laying out the pieces, I didn’t like how it was looking….
My non-quilting friend Charlene looked at it said that all she was seeing was the green fabrics when I really wanted to highlight the pinwheels.
The next day I put on my thinking cap and started drafting more pinwheel block, in larger sizes this time.
I also cut the greet squares down to a smaller size and the result was…..
SOOOO much better.
Now I have to work on the outside borders and decide if I am going to add the triangles on the side or leave those off and play with the borders instead.
I did have one epiphany during this process. I realized that accuracy is going to be super important when I actually start sewing so I tried to fold the squares in half VERY carefully.
As I was cutting down the green squares, I was opening up the fold, cutting the square down to 2 inches and then meticulously re-folding in half. Then I grabbed for a ruler and accidentally picked up on that a friend had given me recently. It is the Eleanor Burns “Quilt In A Day” Triangle Square Up ruler…..
I was able to leave the triangle folded and use the ruler to square it up……
It was SO much faster…..
So, since the baby is being born as we speak, I had better get busy and figure out the borders so that I can start piecing…..and fast!!!