Category: Sunday sketch
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!
Sunday sketch #182
Earlier this year, I came up with a very quick design in EQ8. Sometimes it takes me ages to settle on a design I like; other times, I hit on something pretty quickly.
I had seen a sort of rocket shape somewhere, so played around with it a bit, altering the width and height of each rocket as well as the layout. I settled on this design – it just felt simple and fun.
I didn’t post it as a Sunday sketch at the time. I liked the design so much that I contacted Love Patchwork & Quilting to see if they would be interested in a pattern based on the design – and they were. Fast-forward ~6 months, and Rockets* will be published this week in issue 82 🙂
The actual quilt that I made looks a bit different from the design shown here. Given that it’s all about rockets, it seemed more logical to use a dark background, and a slightly different colour scheme. (And when it comes to quilts, dark backgrounds pose fewer challenges than white backgrounds, for me at least!**)
Check back later this week for a post about the published quilt pattern. I can’t wait to see how it looks in the magazine!
* Often magazines will change the name of submitted quilts, depending on what they’ve published before and what else is in the pipeline. So I’ve no idea if this is actually what they’ll call the published pattern!
** I find that quilts with white background fabrics require a few extra steps: seams with brightly coloured fabrics sometimes need to be trimmed back, so that the colours don’t show through the white fabric; all the stray threads on the back need to be trimmed before basting and quilting, so they don’t break loose and show up through the white fabric; and I need to skip my usual unbleached batting for a pure white batting that will keep the brightness of the white fabric. Of course, all this is doable, but I’ve found that I avoid white backgrounds if I can!
Sunday sketch #181
Another hand-drawn sketch this week, and a super-simple one at that.
You can see from the scale of the background dots and my fill lines just how small this design was on the page of my Rhodia dot pad – only a few centimetres across! I love a good triangle, and I just started placing them on the page, following only one rule: each triangle I added had to touch an adjacent triangle, but only at a tip (no back-to-back edges allowed). I stopped when I was happy with the random arrangement.
Those of you who know how much I like symmetry and order can probably see that despite the ‘improv’ nature of this design, it’s still fairly well balanced in terms of positive vs negative space, and the number of shapes in each quadrant. Even when I’m not trying to be ‘ordered’, it happens 🙂
I like the idea of super-sizing this design to make a bed-sized quilt. Which would mean fairly large triangles, but that would also mean a fairly quick make – and what’s not to like about that?
