FITF: Film in the Fridge | modern quilts, clothing, fabric, and photos

a series of Hope Valley quilts

Posted on December 29, 2009

Remember the quilt blocks I made using Denyse Schmidt’s purple and orange Hope Valley fabrics? I ended up with 16 blocks, and at first, figured I’d just use them all to make one largish lap quilt, as usual. As I kept looking at them though, I kept coming back to this idea I had of a series of smaller quilts, all using the same fabrics but in different combinations. I couldn’t get it out of my mind, so here you have it!

I used 4 of my Hope Valley quilt blocks for each quilt, and then did a slightly different arrangement for each one, changing up the placement of the blocks, the borders, the background colors, and also the quilting.

My favorite part, which you can’t see too closely here, is the addition of tiny squares somewhere on the quilt front which I used as a type of labeling system to signify the order in which they were made. You can see the 1 little square in the quilt on the far right, which was the first of the series. Love it!

The backs are all pieced, using up the remaining printed and solid fabrics, and each quilt is bound with one of the purple Hope Valley prints.

And indeed, I just love them, each and every one (but you probably already knew that, right?!)

I’ll post a closer look at each one over the next couple of days!

Whit finally gets a quilt!

Posted on December 28, 2009

I hope you all had wonderful Christmases with friends and family! We spent a fun Christmas Eve with lots of family –

(cute cousins!)

(my sister and I in unintentionally matching outfits)

Speaking of my sister, in order to create a little less stress for the holidays, we now just pick one family member to buy for, and this year I had my sister. (you might remember I had my brother last year). Anyway, strangely enough, even with all the quilting I do, my sister still was without a handmade quilt!

Whitney definitely hears way more about fabric and quilts than she’d probably like to, but being the sweet sister she is, she always acts interested and is always one of the first to exclaim over each new quilt I make. And while she doesn’t have any interest in sewing or quilting, she does have very definite opinions on fabric, designers, and quilts. So I knew that any quilt I made for her would have to include Anna Maria Horner’s Good Folks. In the end, I opted to use the entire line — why add in anything extra when they already look so beautiful together?!

Now, I won’t lie. I did wait until the last minute to make this quilt, though hopefully that doesn’t diminish the amount of thought that went into it. I’m just a procrastinator… I can’t help it. Since my time was limited (and since my sister was often at our house!) I went for a simple design, cutting the fabrics into 8″ squares. I love a simple quilt made up of squares, and it worked well with this fabric line, allowing you to really see the beautiful designs of each print. To add a little extra something something, I decided to add in a few corresponding solids – making a few blocks with solid centers/printed borders and some with printed centers/solid borders.

I don’t have a picture of the back, but it was predominately my favorite (and also my sister’s favorite, luckily!) Kona Coal, with a nice wide patchwork strip of the Good Folks fabrics. Since Whit seems to have an aversion to any quilt that’s overly quilted (“ack, not soft enough!”) I went with my favorite straight line quilting – one line running diagonally through the blocks in one direction, with a double quilting line running diagonally in the other direction.