Kaleidoscope Festival Quilt

Remember that secret project I was working on earlier this year?! Well I’m so excited that I finally get to share it with you!!

You know my love for Camelot Fabrics (you can see my other collaborations with them: here, here and here), so I was thrilled to get to play with their Kaleidoscope line.  It’s a gorgeous geometric line featuring these soft creams, yellows, coral, aqua and lilac with a shot of dark indigo. Love!

The project I was asked to create was the Festival Quilt designed by Anne Sullivan of Play-Crafts. And I was super excited that the quilt was to be photographed for Craft of Quilting. First time hearing of them? They sell quilt kits, fabric, notions and tools all to help us get our quilty on! If you live in New Hampshire, they have a quilt shop called Keepsake Quilting Shop located on Main Street which I would love to visit one day. Alas, for now, I’ll have to settle for ogling their goods online ;)

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So back to the fun Festival Quilt!

As always, I start with preparing my fabric and cutting up and labelling all my pieces. There are lots of them. Ten different fabrics involved, in fact, excluding the binding and backing, and there is lots of sub-cutting involved. So make sure to keep those puppies labelled to avoid confusion later on. My post it notes kept me nicely on track!

There are a few steps to tackle in creating these blocks, but overall they come together quite nicely. 

You start off with making your central squares. This step is really straight forward and quite relaxing! I do love a good chain piecing session and that’s what this step was all about. Plus, I just loved the large central square that really showcases the beautiful fabric.

From there you move on to joining your smaller 7 ½” x 8” rectangles. Another chain piecing session – easy peasy! Just make sure you join them on the 7 ½” edge and not the longer 8” edge. This is critical. Otherwise, you won’t end up with a series of 7 ½” continuously joined squares at the end and that would be a bummer.

Now for the tricky bit. You need to cut triangles from that continuous strip along the 45° angle between the seams of each square. I would caution how you cut and trim them. I did multiple trials of this stage, as mine ended up being a little short.  Actually a lot short – like ½” short in some cases.  Which, in quilting terms, can make or break your design.  Thankfully your working with triangles cut on a bias, so they had a little wiggle room, but definitely not something you want to rely on. Take your time and measure, measure, measure!

I was a little sad to be cutting off the top of each triangle, but I was consoled once I started adding the darker fabric triangle tips. They looked so cute once all sew together. Plus it was another marathon piecing session, which, as you know by now, is one of my fave quilting activities!

Once you have your large central squares and your triangles all ready to go, now comes the fun step of attaching those together to finish your extra large blocks on point! And I do mean large. Each one finishes at 20 ½”. If you didn’t cut and trim your triangles properly, this is where you will run into problems. Your triangles need to overlap at the very edge just a little. Otherwise, you will have gaps in your squares and you won’t have any wiggle room to square up. So be forewarned. I spent a lot of time with my seam ripper to get them to be just right.

Note, the pattern informs you to attach the triangles based on the layout in the cover photo. But since you are first told to join the 7 ½” x 8” rectangles in random order, this was a little tough to do. So I placed them based on what felt aesthetically right to me.

Once you have your blocks nicely squared up, it’s just a matter of joining them in rows based on the design layout. And since the blocks are so big, this quilt top comes together in no time before finishing it off with a large 5 ½” border.

This sucker is big at 90 x 90. I had to clear lots of furniture to be able to baste her up.  I really do need to look into the board basting method my quilt members are raving about.  Have you tried it?

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When it came time to quilt, I decided to stitch in the ditch to emphasize the large piecing in each block. The fabric is just so gorgeous, I really wanted the focus to be on that. Do you love my rubber gloves "quilting gloves"?! (Apologies for the dark photo, this was a late night quilting session. I was on a tight deadline!!).

I finished by hand sewing the binding to the back all snuggled up underneath her on a snowy January day – total bliss!

The quilt kit is still available at Craft of Quilting and, last I checked, she’s on sale. If you want to give her a go, now’s the time to pick it up! Do tag me on Instagram @shannonfraserdesigns so I can see your project – I’m curious to see how you would quilt her up!

Happy quilting :)

xo

Shannon