Once upon a time, DS2, Sam started High School. He’s a friendly sort, and soon found himself surrounded by a crew of “nerdy” beautiful friends. Who were mainly girls, but that didn’t really matter. They grew up, they changed schools, they graduated, some moved away and back, others went to University, some, like Sam, got a job. But they have all stayed in touch, remained friends, and kept each other in their lives.
Zoe was one such member. She’s a beautiful person, inside and out, with a lot of love for all in her life. This November, we were so happy to witness Zoe marry her forever guy, co-incidentally named Sam, but not my Sam.
Just to embarass them, here’s Sam and Zoe in 2015, end of year 10, just before he left Heathfield HS to move to our local school, Eastern Fleurieu.
Here’s Zoe’s wedding quilt in all it’s crazy glory! The pattern is called A Wild Ride, by the designer Jen Kingwell. I bought the pattern and acrylic templates, which are a must have for these shapes, from Jen at AMQF a few years ago. I’ve been plodding away, cutting up scraps and odd pieces of fabric here and there ever since.
The binding is actually the same stripe I used for Tyson and Lauren’s quilt, but I added in some bias strips of fabric in larger pieces, copying the layout of the stripes in the fabric. Each side has an inset of colour. It’s not obvious when you look at the whole quilt, but it’s a detail I really love.
As you can see, there are a lot of different fabrics in these blocks. What we discovered as we were laying them out, was it was important to have a strong contrast between the three sections of each block. Without this contrast, the triangle design of the block was lost and it just looked sad. Sam and I spent hours picking and choosing sets of fabric, then laying them out in blocks until we were happy with the finished quilt top.
I’ve mentioned this before and will again – your phone and a black and white filter are the quick and dirty ways to make sure you get contrast in your blocks!! You can see here from my phone reel, how each block has very obviously defined areas of dark and light triangles making up the overall pattern. The exception would be the very centre bottom one, where there’s not a lot of obvious definition between the two sets of inner triangles. Having one or two blocks like this in a scrappy quilt is sometimes unavoidable. You simply don’t have enough choices of cut pieces to make it perfect every time. However, taking the time to check your blocks, use a filter, will reduce how much this happens.
But Cassie, I hear you all say, “Why does this even matter?” It matters because it will be the difference between your pattern being “Popped” and will give you better quilt results. Why go to all this effort, cutting up fabric, sewing it back together, if you’re just going to have a bland result, where you can’t even see the pattern you spent hours putting together? I went into it a little in this post here if you want to look at a few more examples.
For a backing, we used this amazing vintage sheet that we scored off eBay. New and unused, still in the packet and don’t those dreamy florals just complement the binding and the quilt top. Of course, as a gift, it’s important to label the quilt, including the name of the recipient, giver, occasion and date. I used a lightbox over a printout of my label to trace the information on, then iron it to set the permanent ink.
Shhhh don’t tell Sam I snuck a photo of him on here. He’s a good sport, always helping me with my quilt photo shoots! Quilting for this one was done in a swirly pantograph called Bubble Bath. I wanted something rounded and soft to counterpoint all the crazy triangles going everywhere in the quilt top.
We didn’t stay until the end of the wedding, so we stole Zoe and Sam away in between their many responsibilities to gift them with their quilt. She was totally taken with it! I hope it brings them many hours of snuggling as they travel on their new journey. It was certainly a wedding to remember with severe thunderstorms and torrential rain!
So, what do you like to sew? Crazy scrappy? All one fabric range? Little of both?
Please be aware that there may be affiliate links in this content. Your support allows me to keep creating for you!
Leave a Reply