Category: Quilt pattern
Quilt pattern: Among the Stars
I’m excited to show you my latest quilt pattern, Among the Stars, which is out now in Love Patchwork & Quilting!
This is a simple and fun pattern featuring rows of rockets pointing up and down. As usual, the staff at Love Patchwork & Quilting have styled the quilt really beautifully (don’t you love the cute little rocket on the desk??).
I only posted the Sunday sketch (#182) for Among the Stars earlier this week, although I created the design (which I imaginatively called ‘Rockets’) earlier this year.
As you can see, I started out with a brighter colour palette and a white background. But I soon realised that it would make more sense to use a blue or dark background for rockets. Not to mention that white backgrounds bring their own set of challenges!
So I revised the EQ8 design with different fabrics, and voila!
In the end, I settled on a mix of fabrics from Ruby Star Society: the Speckled and Pop collections from Rashida Coleman Hale, the Spark collection from Melody Miller, and the Alma range from Alexia Abegg. I love how fabrics from the different collections work so well together!
I also loved how closely the fabrics matched their digital swatches – I was a bit worried that they wouldn’t work so well together in real life, but of course they did. And the colours are so vibrant! Ruby Star Society fabrics are a perfect quilting weight and feel really lovely; it was my first time sewing with them, but it won’t be the last.
Issue 82 of Love Patchwork & Quilting is on sale from Tuesday 24 December. You can find the magazine in newsagents and online.
If you make Among the Stars, I would love to see it. Tag me on Instagram (@geometriquilt) or send me an email!
Quilt pattern: Northern Lights
My latest quilt pattern, Northern Lights, is out now in Love Patchwork & Quilting!
I posted the Sunday sketch (#124) for Northern Lights on 11 November 2018 – almost a full year ago!
I ended up changing the colour palette and reversing the order of the colours, with the darkest on the outside. I went with a cool-ish palette: (from dark to light) Navy, Ultramarine, Candy Green and Ice Frappe, all Kona Cotton solids from Robert Kaufman. The backing is Mist from Jennifer Sampou’s Chalk and Charcoal collection, which is also manufactured by Robert Kaufman.
Northern Lights is my first paper-pieced pattern, and it was a steep learning curve for me! The blocks are quite large – 18″ square – and I tried freezer paper piecing before going back to normal paper. Because there are 4 copies of each block, I eventually got into a rhythm of placing, sewing, pressing, trimming, placing, sewing, pressing, trimming….until they were all done. There was a point where I wasn’t sure I was going to manage it, but it’s amazing what a deadline can do to motivate me 🙂
Northern Lights was quilted by Sharni Crossett from Lyrebird and Lamb Quilt Works. Sharni has done a few quilts for me now, and she has taken a huge weight off my shoulders (literally as well as figuratively, haha). I’d love to get better at the actual quilting stage of making a quilt, but for now, it’s an area where I’d rather pay a professional – particularly for quilts that are destined for magazines!
Issue 80 of Love Patchwork & Quilting is on sale from Wednesday 30 October. You can find it in newsagents or online.
If you make Northern Lights, please tag me on Instagram (@geometriquilt) or send me an email. I’d love to see it!
Quilt pattern: Whirlwind
I’m still submitting quilt patterns to magazines, because a deadline seems to be the only way to motivate me to sew! My latest pattern is out now in Quilt Now, a UK-based quilt magazine. Meet Whirlwind!
Whirlwind started life as Sunday sketch #119, which I posted on Instagram on 7 October 2018. I had sketched out an idea of interlocking curved arrows on paper, then figured out the actual construction in Electric Quilt 8.
It’s actually a lot easier to make than it might look*: some rectangles and squares, a few curves, and a few quarter-square triangles. My Instagram feed from around that time shows a few other variations you could easily make – for example, by replacing the arrowheads with rectangles (#120) or going monochromatic (#121).
I used all Art Gallery Fabrics – Pure Solids in Canary, Burnt Orange, London Red, Raspberry Rose and Snow for the front, and Squared Elements in Citrine for the back. I’d used Art Gallery Fabrics before, for Loophole, so I knew they’d have a lovely look and feel. And the range of colours in the Pure Solids collection meant that I had no problems picking the right shades of yellow, orange, red and pink (still one of my favourite combinations!).
And I decided I’m not going to stress over machine quilting anymore! I am thrilled to have found a fantastic edge-to-edge longarmer, Sharni Crossett from Lyrebird and Lamb Quilt Works, to quilt my quilts for me. I used to agonise over the cost, but I’ve finally realised that it’s more than worth it: sending my quilts out saves me not only lots of time, but also lots of stress, panic, anxiety, and more stress. I think edge-to-edge quilting patterns look much nicer and more professional than my go-to grid quilting, too.
If you make Whirlwind, I’d love to see it! Tag me on Instagram or send me an email.
Issue 63 of Quilt Now is on sale from Thursday 16 May. You can find it in newsagents or online.
* I’m pretty sure I always say that! But it’s true 🙂
Geometriquilt 