Playing with Blocks

It’s always when I have a million other things to do that I get distracted doing something unproductive but fun. Last night I played with the solid strike-offs from Moda and made these paper-pieced blocks. Yeah, I know I need a new iron. The top two are totally 80s! And I would love to frame them in white and make a quilt. But not today.

These represent the colorways in my Quilt Blocks collection. The top two are from the spectrum colorway and the bottom two from the shade and marine colorways, respectively. Not all of these will be available as solids in the Bella collection, but some will. Speaking of Quilt Blocks, Kim over at True Up did a nice feature, so go check it out!

Anyway, I have included these 8″x8″ blocks in a printable .pdf if you need a distraction too. If you’ve never worked with the paper piecing technique, you can watch some videos on YouTube and experiment until you get the gist of it.

 

Actual Fabric

It’s been a rough few days around here, but there was a brief bright spot over the weekend when some of my Quilt Blocks fabric arrived in the mail yesterday from Moda. These two prints will be the only prints available for Quilt Market and the rest will be shown on paper. But I’m looking forward to making some things. And these are definitely two of my favorite prints: Wedding Rings and Flying Geese. The Wedding Rings pattern is available in four color options. Now, what should I make? Really, I have no idea where to start.

Sneak Peek: Quilt Blocks for Moda

These are images from my new fabric collection for Moda! I’m getting excited to go to Quilt Market at the end of next month and looking forward to getting a few bits of fabric soon so I can make some things. This collection was obviously inspired by quilt patterns, but I wanted to break the patterns down to their essence and hopefully make something a bit modern. I don’t consider myself an artist one bit, but I’m interested in shape and color.

The colorway above is called spectrum. What started out with every color under the sun ended up mostly in the pink range. My 6-year-old has actually made me learn to love pink.

There are nine designs in the Quilt Blocks collection and 30 fabrics total, with a couple of extra colors in some of the prints (not shown here). I started with the Wedding Rings design, mostly inspired by the wedding rings pattern of the quilt that spent years on my bed as a child, then through my adult years and now is on my younger daughter’s bed. It’s hard to get a sense of the scale from these images, but many of these would make simple whole cloth quilts or patterned backings, a bit like cheater fabric.

This colorway is called marine:

When I was in college, I remember reading an article in Martha Stewart Living about Denyse Schmidt. I was incredibly inspired by her work and thought “That’s what I want to do.” But I was distracted by other things, so I didn’t get a sewing machine for another 8 years. I still remember that article, followed by the inspiration of the Gee’s Bend quilts that I still love so much. It seemed that my interest in folk art and modern art had come together in one place.

Below is the shade colorway. These are all scanned images of the actual fabric, so the mottled look just came across in the scan. The backgrounds are all solid. Lots of these fabrics use a white background and a limited number of colors, because those are the kind of fabrics that I like to sew with best. While I love large scale prints, it’s always the utilitarian, small-scale fabrics that I use most. The small hexagons have a flowered border just at the selvedge, which I envision along the hemline of a skirt.

It’s nerve-wracking to put these designs out there, so I hope you like them. These fabrics will be sold to fabric shops at fall market, but won’t be available in your local quilting shop until early next year.

In the mail

Yesterday I received the new Liberty Book of Home Sewing and this yard of Julia Rothman’s Miscellany fabric for Cloud 9 Fabrics, ordered from Sew Fresh Fabrics. I can see mixing this print with some Liberty prints with red, like the one on the cover here and making a quilt or pillow.

Michelle at Cloud 9 continues to crank out some really great collections from fabulous artists. I can’t wait to get my hands on some of this fabric from Geninne D. Zlatkis (print below).

And speaking of Liberty prints, what do you think of this new Hello Kitty Liberty collection? Sophisticated is not normally a word I would use to describe Hello Kitty, but this collection is really nice.