Etsy AllisonsPatchworks

I-Spy Shadow Quilt Pattern and Novelty Fabric Packs

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I-Spy Shadow Quilt (with feet!)

I-Spy quilts are such a fun idea! A quilt is a lovely gift for a child: a warm comforting wrap, a picnic blanket, a magic carpet, a den – a child’s imagination will take that quilt and make it more than the maker could ever have dreamed! An I-Spy quilt can be all those things and a ready-made game too. Novelty fabrics pieced together make a perfect, portable ‘board’ for playing games of ‘I-Spy with my little eye’. All the family can join in, honing observation skills, extending vocabulary and developing letter-sound recognition. Play on the sofa, on a bed, on the floor, in the garden or in a car.

Am I selling the notion of I-Spy quilts to you? 😀

I-Spy with my little eye…. something beginning with S:

Snail? Seahorse? See anymore? 😉

I designed the I-Spy Shadow Quilt with forty-two novelty squares seeming to float above the quilt casting shadows on the background. I love the illusion made by placement of light and dark fabrics across the quilt top. The pattern is available to purchase as a PDF download from my Etsy shop, AllisonsPatchworks.

The pattern uses strip-piecing to speed up the cutting and piecing of this quilt. If you are not familiar with strip-piecing, don’t worry it’s all explained in the pattern. With very few seams to match and no sashing strips to line-up, this quilt can be made by a patchwork quilter with basic skills: able to follow a pattern, use a rotary cutter and stitch consistent quarter inch seams.

And the quilt details:

 

The pattern requires 42 novelty fabric squares. It can take quite a lot of time and effort to source that many fabrics – ask me how I know 😉 A pack of 5″ novelty fabric squares would be handy wouldn’t it? Well! What-do-you-know? Take a look in my ETSY shop, AllisonPatchworks, and you’ll find packs of 21 or 42 novelty squares, sorted, cut and ready to piece. The packs of 21 squares include UK postage and cost £8.50 each. The packs of 42 squares include UK postage and cost £15 each.

Find the I-Spy Shadow Quilt Pattern and the novelty squares fabric packs at my ETSY Shop, AllisonsPatchworks.

Allison

 

Baby Quilt Finish and Pattern Release

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I’m very pleased to have finished the ‘Four Patch Dash’ baby quilt. 🙂 I designed this little quilt with speed in mind – hence the ‘dash’ in the title! The pattern PDF is now available to purchase and download from my Etsy store, AllisonsPatchworks.

The design is fat quarter friendly, using five fat quarters for the four patch blocks with some extra yardage for the borders. Definitely a quilt that can be quickly put together using stash fabrics!

I used a sea creature print fat quarter as the feature fabric of my quilt. The colours in the print helped in the choosing of four plain fat quarters from my stash.

In the pattern I have given instructions to cut fat quarters into long rectangles. These are used to strip piece the four patch blocks. Strip piecing saves a lot of cutting and time and helps with accuracy too. If you’d rather be using up scraps than using fat quarters, there is a cutting chart and instructions for making the blocks using individual squares.

To make the quilt sandwich, I pieced a backing (including the label) and used a piece of soft, easy care Quilter’s Dream Green wadding. To keep with the sea theme of the feature fabric I decided on simple ‘watery’ looking quilting designs. The wavy lines across the four patch blocks were stitched using a walking foot and a 40wt variegated Aurifil thread, 3817. In the borders I free motion stitched a ripple design using a 50wt Aurifil thread, 6724, which blends well with the unbleached calico. I used the same ripple design on a smaller scale to quilt the feature fabric blocks.

The quilt finished at 39″ x 39″ and used 5 Fat Quarters plus a yard of fabric for the front and half a yard for the binding. Backing and wadding were cut to 46″ x 46″ before trimming.

All finished with a blue/green binding. This was hand stitched to the back after my failed experiment with a different binding technique! I will give that technique another try but with wider binding..

Here is the Four Patch Dash quilt in a different colourway:

That’s the story of this little quilt! The pattern is now available as a PDF download from my Etsy store. I’m very happy to provide a 20% discount to readers of this blog as a thank you for your friendly and encouraging support :-). Use the code FOURPATCH or this link: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/AllisonsPatchworks?coupon=FOURPATCH

Offer ends Thursday 4th June.

Allison

Saturday Quilting Bring and Share (84)

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Welcome to Saturday Quilting Bring & Share 🙂 Bring along your project(s) and share in some of the news, views and inspiration doing the rounds of the Worldwide Quilting Community. Do join in the sharing by clicking on the links and using the comments box at the end of this page. There’s an email subscription box too if you’d like to keep track of my blog posts week by week.

It’s been a funny old week for me. My husband has been away for six nights on a business trip – to the Caribbean would you believe! He arrived home safely on Friday morning – it was -1ºC when his plane landed at Gatwick, the day before he’d flown out of Antigua after enjoying a swim in temperatures nearing 30ºC!

Seven days and six nights home alone…! I coped but I wouldn’t like to have to do it too often. For a start I struggle to eat properly when I’m on my own – so tempting to have a few slices of toast rather than preparing vegetables and

Read moreSaturday Quilting Bring and Share (84)

Building a Log Cabin Workshop

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The Log Cabin block is one of my favourites to piece. I find the huge range of layouts that can be made just by re-orientating a few of these blocks quite fascinating. So when a quilt group friend expressed an interest in learning how to make a Log Cabin quilt my little brain cogs starting whirring!

Whirligig Log Cabin by Allison Reid
Log Cabin blocks arranged in a ‘Whirligig’ pattern – I made this quilt way back in 2015
Another of my Log Cabin quilts. The blocks are arranged in a ‘Fields and Furrows’ layout

First of all I gave some thought to the skills and techniques I could teach using the Log Cabin block. I decided to teach a basic square-in-the-middle block using speedy strip piecing techniques for part of the workshop and then switch to the slower, but more precise, individual rotary cut piece technique to make curved Log Cabin blocks.

Log Cabin Class Quilt (1) by Allison ReidNext step was to draw up the blocks and play around with layouts on EQ7…

The blocks are 10″ finished and the quilt top with borders measures 68″ square. Once I started getting down to the nitty-gritty math of the quilt I was pleased to find this pattern will be ‘Jelly Roll friendly’. I was even more pleased when I found a Moda French General Jelly Roll listed on Lucy’s ‘Secret Garden Quilting’ website that looked to have the limited colour palette I had in mind for my sample quilt 🙂

And whoopie-do when the Jelly Roll arrived – and I did that brave thing and unrolled it – I found just the right number of blue strips and red strips required for the quilt top 🙂 There are a few beige strips too and these  can be used as background. The beige strips helped me to colour-match low-volume fabrics from my stash to make up the 2m of background fabric I’ve calculated is needed to complete the design . We shall see! Obviously making up a sample quilt is a good and necessary part of testing a pattern but it’s fun too; seeing an idea move from paper or a screen to being realised in fabrics.

Stars and Moons jelly roll by Allison Reid
Moda ‘Vive La France’ Jelly Roll
Stars and Moons jelly roll strips by Allison Reid
Vive La France Jelly Roll strips decorating my design wall 🙂

This morning I spent a couple of hours making a start writing the pattern on my lap top. It takes me quite a while to do this. As I’m writing I think through the logical steps in choosing fabrics, cutting the fabrics, making the blocks and putting the quilt top together. I enjoy teaching workshops using my own patterns as I get to see them being used and I learn more about the different ways patchwork quilters read and interpret patterns.

I’m planning to schedule the ‘Build a Log Cabin Workshop’ for early in the New Year. Keep an eye on the Workshop of this blog for a date and venue 🙂

While the Log Cabin workshop pattern has some way to go before publication you can find my other patterns by clicking on to my Etsy Shop, www.etsy.com/uk/shop/AllisonsPatchworks . Most are available as instant download PDFs, a few are hard copy paper patterns for sale in the UK only.

Linking with Judy for Design Wall Monday. Judy has a teeny-tiny Apple Core quilt in the making. Also linking with Beth for Monday Making, she shares the beautiful square-in-a-square applique quilt she has been busy working on the past week.

Allison