Two Blossoms QAL: Week 1
Welcome to Week 1 of the Two Blossoms QAL!
This week we’ll be selecting colours and fabric for our quilt project.
Next week we’ll trace out the pattern and start cutting out the quilt.
To join this QAL you will need to have my book ‘pieced’ as this contains the Two Blossoms pattern. ‘Pieced’ is available as a digital version here, or as a paper version here.
The Two Blossoms quilt is 50cm by 50cm. It was designed to be an introduction to my process for creating beautiful quilts with piecework. It’s a small piece which looks stunning framed, or could also be turned into a cushion if you wish.
The QAL is hosted here via my blog, and you can share your progress with our QAL on Instagram. Follow the hashtag #twoblossomsquilt on Instagram, and post your weekly progress there with the same hashtag, or tag me @ruthdevosart.
Sign up to receive weekly QAL reminder emails.
THIS WEEK:
Post a photo of your fabric pull and/or colour plan. Be sure to tag #twoblossomsquilt and @ruthdevosart.
FABRIC SELECTION
When you’re selecting your fabrics, you want to think about whether to use solids, low volume prints, or busier prints.
It would be fun to try this pattern with a few prints, but you will want to make sure that not every fabric used is a busy print. And you may like to mix up solids and prints. Some fine Liberty prints would look stunning incorporated into the blossoms!
It’s important to use a range of tonal values. By this I mean that, in your range of greens, you want a dark fabric and a light fabric. Likewise in your brown range. And the blossom colours should also vary between light and dark. If your fabrics all have a similar tonal value, the quilt can look quite monotonous. One way to check this is to take a photo of your fabric selection, change it to black and white, and then check whether you can see a range of lights and darks.
I mostly use plain fabrics in my quilts. I love to use hand-dyed fabric in my art quilts, but for this QAL I am using a mix of Kona and Devonstone solids.
While the pattern says to use two shades of blue for the sky (for variation), I’m using a beautiful Devonstone cotton linen blend as the background fabric. You could also use a low volume print or two for the background fabric.
Don’t feel like you need to stick to the colour plan I have given - we all have our own colour preferences!
You may like to print out the image in the ‘order of piecing’ PDF and colour it in, to try out your colour choices before cutting out your quilt.
If you’d like to keep things simple, you can purchase my Two Blossoms kit here.
SORTING THE FABRIC
To keep things manageable, I suggest that you label each of your fabrics according to the colour chart. We’re going to be cutting the quilt out in sections, and having labels on your fabric means that you don’t have to work out which colour is which every time again. I pin little scraps of paper to my fabrics.
If you’re in a live workshop with me, I will ask you to arrange your fabrics in an orderly manner on your worktable. Keeping the fabric folded and in order when you are not using it is the best way to be sure that you don’t lose or confuse quilt pieces during the project. I lay mine out in colour order, overlapping each other, across my workspace.
