Penny Patch fabrics

The fabrics for the quilt along arrived yesterday!  Last night I got busy cutting the fabric in half to make fat quarters and bundling them up to mail to my sister in Maine today.

My daughter Bea and my sister are going to be making the same quilts—Bea is going to give hers to her teacher’s daughter as a Christmas present and my sister is making hers as a baby gift.

My sister is relatively new to sewing/quilting.  And Bea wanted (desperately) to learn how to use the rotary cutter.  So, I suggested we do a family quilt along.  My sister started out by going to the Fat Quarter Shop and picking a few fabric lines she liked, and then I did a little mixing and matching and this is what I came up with.  I suggested the Fat Quarter Shop because they seriously have such a wide selection you could spend hours scrolling through it all.  It was interesting to see what collections she picked—batiks, civil war repro, novelty prints—her choices were very diverse. 

I ended up picking Riley Blake “Enchant” that she liked as the base for all the other fabrics.  It has some really cute deer, rabbits, and foxes and novelty prints, but I didn’t pick those because most of the fabrics Rachel picked for her quilt were small scale prints.  One of the things I tried to do when I first started quilting was “recreate” a quilt from a pattern, but a lot of times my efforts would fall flat because I didn’t pick appropriate fabrics.  Plus I was remembering how much trouble I had with directional fabric when I first started sewing.  I was a little worried with only fat quarters for cutting, we might have to use a few deer  butts instead of heads in some of the blocks and nobody likes a body with the head cut off.  At least I don’t!

The two “reds” I ordered online and was a little nervous about how they would look together.  The Enchant floral was labeled “pink” and the Wallflowers print was labeled “red,” but my gut said they’d go together.  I’m quite pleased with how they look.

Just when I thought I was getting better at selecting fabric, low volume prints have become popular and thrown a monkey wrench into it.  I ordered some of these low volume fabrics with the other fabrics, but about half are from my stash.  There’s one more fabric that isn’t in either of these photos.  It’s a very light blue floral, and I’m not sure it qualifies as a “blue” or a “low volume,” so we’ll just have to see as the quilt along develops.

Hope you have a quilty weekend!