Tomorrow starts the annual Quilt MN Shop Hop. This year's fabric designs are fun and festive. I love the panel designs!
The orange in the butterflies is really beautiful and vibrant, in person.
Every year, I tend to go to my local quilt store, buy fabric that I love, and then never actually use it. Either because I didn't buy enough of one or more of the fabrics when I finally think of a design, or because I just don't know what to do with it. Or, I buy a quilt kit and just sew out someone else's work.
This year, I wanted to do something different and plan out a quilt of my own. in advance, so that I know how much and what to buy.
This year's fabric has several different sized panels (like those above), so I was able to download the images, and learned how to size and scale it as I brought it into EQ 8. Using that and the fussy cutting fabric tool, I was able to play around with designs until I found one I really like:
So, this year I will need to buy one panel with the larger blocks, one panel with the smaller blocks, and then at least a yard of the white background, 1 1/2 yards (plus more for binding) of the blue, and another yard for the border.
I'm going to work on writing my own pattern, and using some strip piecing to do the nine patches, rather than doing the more common (but easier to write a pattern) sub cutting of all the tiny patches. I'll try to document the process, and write out the pattern to get some practice at it!
Thanks for stopping by (and happy hopping, quilters)!
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