Saturday, February 18, 2012

First Quilt: Fabric Selection


Happy New Year! I hope you had a lovely Christmas (or insert your preferred holiday here) and here's to a happy, healthy and crafty New Year!

I'm so excited I can hardly contain myself....I am finally making my first quilt! I'm going to blog about my adventures, this will be the first in the series. Stay tuned for more!

Phase One: Fabric Selection

Life's too short and I'm done thinking about making quilts, its time to make one. This all started when I decided to sort through my fabric stash the other weekend. I stumbled across some Alexander Henry fabric from the Farmdale line. I have five of the prints from the bright pinks, aqua and lime colorway (please excuse the wrinkles).

Farmdale fabric brights

I love the bright colors and the retro style of the prints and thought it would be great for my first quilt… but I felt too much pressure to find the perfect pattern and was afraid I'd waste the fabric.

Luckily, I remembered that I had two other Farmdale prints from the browns, reds and oatmeal colorway in my stash: the one with the black background and apples and the oatmeal one with circles (pictured below)…. I'm not sure why I bought them as these colors are very different from what I like.  Then I got a fabulous idea! It's my first quilt, if it doesn't turn out I won't miss this fabric. Perfect! 

I only had a 1/2 yard of each so I went online and bought some of the Farmdale "Blossom" print in red. I wanted to use the Easy, Striped Baby Quilt pattern from the book Quilting for Peace by Katherine Bell. It calls for 1/2 yard each of four prints and I only had three so I headed over to The Quilting Loft in Ballard (one of my favorite fabric shops). Laurie helped me choose two fabrics to go with the three I had. She was very helpful and taught me some really great tips on choosing fabric: 

1. Find the best light, we took our fabric selections into their classroom. If it was during the day we probably would've viewed them by a window.

2. Walk away then turn around and take a one-second glance at your fabric selections, see if any stand out from the rest.

3. Use your gut and be open to fabrics you wouldn't normally consider. So true!

Here are the fabrics I ended up with:

fabric for first quilt

Coming next in the First Quilt Series-
Phase 2: Pattern Selection and Improvisational Cutting

Have a lovely day!
Allison