Fairies Quilt

Whew, this week has been interesting. Exhausting. DD2 is not sleeping as well at night all the sudden and we’re all feeling the effects after several nights of less sleep.

What was I say? Oh yes. Quilt layout.

So someone asked in the comments of this blog about how I decided to place my fabrics in the Fairies Quilt. Really it isn’t all that hard, just takes some thinking. For this quilt I had nine different fabrics. The first thing I did was look at the scale of the prints.

White – 2 – both large scale

Teal – 2 – 1 large scale, 1 small scale

Yellow – 2 – 1 medium scale, 1 small scale

Burgundy – 2 – both medium scale

Pink – 1 – small scale

In order to best show off the prints, anything large scale needed to be a corner. The small scale needed to be in the center. The medium could fill in where needed. So I place the white and one of the teals in the corners to start and the pink in the middle. Then I played around the the remainder of the colors until I settled on the arrangement you see above. The goal was to make sure no two prints of the same color were right next to each other. In the end you have stacks of blocks that look like this.

Then I just needed to place with the orientation of each square so see what looked best to me. There really is no perfect way to do it. Just a personal preference.

Here you can see two slightly different layouts I tested. The one thing I would do differently next time is to do all the 9 patch squares exactly the same. For this quilt I wanted to be “fancy” and switched the placement of the burgundy fabrics in half of the squares and then when I went to lay everything out I didn’t have each fabric in the right amount for what I wanted. Oh well. Making my own quilts is about the process as much as the product, but perfection is not my goal.

In new project news, I do have a little something I’ve started working on using Princess Life by Ann Kelle. It’s another day care nap blanket for DD1, but I haven’t been able to land on an arrangement I like yet. Have thoughts? Let me know! I am stumped.

Why buy something when you can make it with a skill set you already possess? One thing I’ve learned over my lifetime is that what I make for myself lasts a lot better than what I can buy in the store so when I realized Darling Daughter #1 really needed a bigger blanket for nap time at school I decided to try my hand at making one.

As I posted a few days ago, last fall I took up quilting. So DD1 and I set off looking
for fabrics she would like for her blanket. Choice #1 was the Girl Friends ballerina print from Ann Kelle for Robert Kaufman.

But I didn’t love it for a blanket.

So we looked again and found the perfect collection, Fairyville by Heather Rosas from Camelot Fabrics. I also found a tutorial for making disappearing nine patches on Cluck Cluck Sew. It worked out perfectly.

And she loves it.

This project has a couple of firsts for me too. First time machine quilting, first time binding a quilt, and it was my first time sewing with minky. But all want together smoothly and I am so pleased with her little nap blanket. No more baby blankets for my big grown up preschooler.