Today I am excited to launch a brand new series that I have been working on for a couple of months. I have partnered up with a group of amazingly talented artisans, quilters, embroiderers, and sewists to launch the Ruby Ambassador series. I’m kicking off this series with one of my favorite quilting artists- Timna Tarr!
I am currently making a basic thousand pyramid quilt design for our bed, and cutting lots of ” equilateral triangles. I plan to pull all of the lighter fabrics from my stash to build this design. A king sized bed takes up lots of visual room in any bedroom and I don’t want this to be an overwhelming presence. So nothing crazy. Plus, if I use all my light colored fabrics in my stash, I will have the perfect excuse to buy more, right?
When building a scrappy quilt design using the power of color value, as I plan to do, understanding that not all light colored fabrics are light in value can take your quilt to new levels. (This also applies to dark fabrics too.) Let me explain what I mean.
We sewers usually have some sort of a fabric stash. A literal stockpile of cloth to be used for making quilts or other projects. We sketch designs on scraps of paper or we start with a pattern. We form a plan, with a sincere hope to start soon. There’s comfort in knowing that when we are ready to start, there’s a pile(s) of pretty fabric, right at our fingertips, to pull from. A fabric stash represents hope in our lives, a future of creativity! The promise of quilts.
The challenge a scrappy quilt poses fascinates me constantly. They are bit like a puzzle, with all the pieces fitting together to create a scrappy story that is most successful when it creates a visual story. Creating a good visual story with scraps is a great challenge for me. I start every one of these quilts from my fabric stash. I love the idea that I am constantly dipping into and using up all those fabrics. That’s why I bought them, right? But did you know that some fabrics are better to use than others? I have two tips for you!
The Ruby Ruler™ is now just over a year old. Hard for me to believe! I had so much fun creating that product and getting it to market. There’s is a huge amount of satisfaction around thinking of “hey, what if…”, seemingly kooky idea (at first), and actually making it happen. Ruby Rulers have now shipped all over the world and I’ve now restocked 4 times!
Late last year, I once again recognized that familiar itch to design a new product creeping in. I was stitching a new version of the Boro quilt from Wise Craft Quilts for the live stitching sessions of #wisecraftstitchalong in my Facebook Group.
When you begin making scrappy quilts using the power of their light and dark value differences, you will unlock a whole new side of your stash. Meaning, suddenly, its not about the fabric you love. Its more about the fabric that works. When you start thinking this way, you look at the fabrics on your shelves differently.
Color value is a good thing to understand when you are designing your quilts. It can help you create and define shapes in the layout, and is an important thing to be aware of when choosing fabrics and deciding color placement. I just posted a little mini lesson on value in my Instagram Stories and thought I’d post it here too!
On its surface, determining color value differences between two fabrics is not a difficult. One is light and one is dark, right? In my lectures and workshops, I focus more on the concept of relative lightness or darkness of fabrics. This can be a bit harder to understand, especially in the context of a full quilt layout.
Have you been to Sew Expo? It takes place so close to me and I have never been! But that’s all going to change this year!READ MORE
About a year and a half ago, I had a spec of an idea. To design a functional quilting and design tool that could be used to creatively utilize the many fabric scraps I had in my stash, accumulated over years of sewing patchwork. My thinking was, if I have this many scraps and fabric cuts that need to be used in quilts, there must be others out there with the same problem.READ MORE
As I was stuck on the computer last week, getting the new site ready, I decided to make a new quilt collage for the Tufted quilt project that is in the current issue of Simply Moderne Magazine (Issue #14). READ MORE