Hello everyone,
It has been a very wet February - it feels as though it has rained every day this month and there has been significant flooding in parts of England. No chance to garden means I have had more time to spend sewing...
I went a little mad this month as I know that when the weather improves there will be tons to do outside. My priority has been to finish some WIPs which were long overdue some attention. Some of them date back more years than I care to remember.
However the weather has been so bad I haven't had a chance to get photos of those recently finished tops, so here are pictures of a quilt I finished just before Christmas, in time to gift it to a friend for his birthday:
The quilt is Facet from Kaffe Fassett's book 'Simple Shapes, Spectacular Quilts'. I had wanted to make this quilt for so long as I have been a hoarder of KF fabrics for years, though always a little daunted about using them.
I honestly cannot remember when I started piecing this quilt: like so many of my projects they each have their rest periods when I get stuck and/or distracted by other matters. Anyway at some point in 2019 I decided that the time had come to 'get Facet done'!
This design is not as daunting as some 'arty' quilts. The instructions give clear directions for sorting the fabrics into colour groups, focusing also on relative lights and darks. I needed four dark sets (from my available stash of fabrics I chose purples, reds, browns and greens) and four light sets (pinks, oranges, blues and mossy greens).
Because of the multicolour character if many of Kaffe Fassett's fabrics there is plenty of room for interpretation of which group a fabric fits into, and this gives real depth and variation within the blocks. Where I was short of fabrics from the KF stable (mostly in regard to the light groups), I did add in a few others from my general stash to increase the variety.
The fact that the strips for the strip sets were cut into different widths, varying between 1 1/4" and 3", and I had to use lots of fabrics freed me to be bolder in my fabric choices. The exact position of each individual fabric became less important than the overall light/dark colour grouping, so I didn't feel intimidated by having to make the 'right' decision in relation to a particular fabric.
The method was right up my street too: lots of cutting and machine stitching into strip sets, pressing and trimming into large rectangles (measuring precisely 8 5/8" x 17 5/8"!), which were then cut diagonally into long triangles, rearranged and stitched together in blocks.
I put the spare triangles on the back - too delicious not to use, even though I had plenty of extra wide backing fabric and didn't really need to piece it! The binding was a large multicolour floral in the Lotus design which carries flashes of all the dark colours around the quilt.
The longarm quilting was done by my friend Chris at The Quilt Room as this is a very large quilt (I had a lot of fabric and just kept on cutting strips!). The quilt measured 87" x 116" which is quite a bit bigger than the version in the book. I didn't want to add a border though that would be a good option if you didn't want to make so many blocks.
It is quite a long thin quilt, so that's why the photos of the whole quilt on the washing line have the diamonds longways on. However that's how it came out for me in terms of the repetition of the blocks. The quilt is 7 blocks long by 11 blocks across (the blocks are long and thin - quite unlike the majority of blocks we tend to work with as quilters).
I hope all that wonderful KF colour has cheered up your Leap Year extra day and that you stay warm and safe, wherever you are.
