Round 1

Well, I sent out all of my fabric for the swap on Friday. I'm hoping that this post goes up before you receive the fabric, because I was too rushed to include a little note or instructions.

I've sent out a collection of red, black and white printed and solid fabric. The red fabric is from various Alexander Henry collections and the black and white fabrics are from my stash. I added the houndstooth and damask fabric at the last minute because the solid red fabric I had bought wasn't quite matching all of the reds in the printed fabric.



I'm planning on using this quilt in our guest bedroom, so this will eventually become a full sized quilt to go on the guest bed. I will be repainting the room this month (I have an accidental red, blue and white thing going on right now, and I'm not such a fan of the color scheme). Right now, the furniture in the room is all black and the artwork is mostly red and black. I'll be painting the walls a light brown/beige color. In my head, the warmth of the walls will balance out the starkness of a red/white/black quilt. We'll see how that goes!

So, as for the instructions...I'd love for you all to make a 10" to 11" square that is made up of rectangles or squares. This means that anything that is striped, log cabin-y, box-y or wonky works for me. It's pretty much up to you. I'm going to be assembling the quilt somewhat like this diagram, with most of the quilt being white and then a section of the black and red blocks that you'll be making. I have some leftover scraps, so I might add some more patchwork into the colorful strip on the quilt. I'll play with that once I have all of the blocks together.




Melissa wanted me to share a little bit about how I plan out quilt projects so that I know that I have enough fabric together. I have sort of tried this before and it helps. (But, bear in mind that this is coming from the girl who never knows what the exact final size will be because she always ends up having to lop off a side because the whole project turned out crooked!) I usually check out the joanns.com website to see the size of batting I will be using and then sketch out the quilt, measure the dimensions and then try to lay out the pieces on the fabric I'm going to be using. Then I convert these measurements to the common fabric sizing that they have (changing inches to yards and making sure that most pieces fall into the 40-44" fabric width).

For this quilt, I'm planning on the final size being 90" x 90." So, I'm guessing that the final strip in the middle will be about 30"x90", the top white strip will be 20"x90" and the bottom white panel will be 40"x90." So, I'll be buying 5 yards of 40" wide fabric (90" x 2 for top and bottom = 180"/36" per yard = 5 yards). I can use the extra white fabric for sashing around the quilt blocks.



Here's a flickr mosaic of inspiring quilting patterns that are appealing to me. Feel free to base your design on something you see here or on something completely different! I can't wait to see what you all come up with. If you have any questions, let me know : ) Oh, and feel free to add in any fabric that you have if you like, although I'm totally not expecting you to do so. I hope I included enough fabric for one square.

Rebekah