Up next!

I've been quiet on the blog for a little while, as I haven't been sewing and knitting is so dreadfully slow... besides, updates on knitting projects that are, well, uneventful, are rather dull. It would be different if I were working on something really challenging that needed explanations on new techniques and such, but that isn't the case here.

I do have something new up my sleeve, however. I've been wanting a nice quilt for our bedroom for some time, but couldn't decide what colours to use. Originally, I thought I'd go with olive and burgundy, as we have dark furniture and an olive green wall behind the bed, but that sounded too dark, and was a bit more masculine than I wanted.

Of course, I didn't think my husband would be terribly keen on a really feminine quilt, either, so that left a lot of fabrics out of the question. No pastels, no girly florals. I didn't want anything really dark, and I didn't want to have to repaint the feature wall, so I decided to start with a pattern, and hope that inspiration struck.

All People Quilt

After a lot of looking, I found the High Light quilt pattern, from All People Quilt. I've turned to them for patterns before, and I like that they have a good selection of modern quilt patterns, as well as more traditional patterns.

What I liked about this pattern is that the blocks are fairly large, which allows me to use bolder prints. There are plenty of options when you use large blocks! My daughter's quilt has large blocks, which meant it went together quickly, and I could use pretty much any fabric I wanted.

I also like the yellow sections used in this quilt, as they add pops of bright colour without being overwhelming.

©Aspiring Threads

The next step was choosing fabric. I had some fabric in my stash that I quite liked, but had no specific plans for. I brought a swatch of it to the fabric store, and came home with this... The aforementioned fabric is the black and green one on the bottom, by the way. The green in the fabric is similar to, but lighter than the feature wall, so it ties everything together nicely.

The other fabrics are a variety of greys, greens and yellows, with a bit of white mixed in for good measure. Normally I'm not a big fan of yellow, but the yellow fabric is a soft, buttery colour and there won't be a lot of it, so I think it will work nicely without being too much for my tastes. I think it'll be a fantastic quilt, and I'm looking forward to starting it. I do still need to plan out my blocks, but they're pretty straightforward, so that shouldn't take long. I do need to modify the quilt a little, since we have a queen sized bed with a king sized duvet on it (queen sized duvets are never big enough for a queen sized bed).

An added bonus is that my sister in law started a long arm quilting business a few months back, so I won't have to struggle with quilting a large piece on my machine. I don't have backing fabric yet, but that's no rush, since I haven't even begun cutting yet.

©Aspiring Threads

Here's the plan for the quilt, since I'm a visual person. As I mentioned, I'm going to have to modify the pattern to make a larger quilt, so I'm adding two extra rows of blocks to make it four blocks long by five blocks wide, instead of three blocks wide. This will give me a quilt that is large enough to cover a king sized duvet.

The border fabric is the green on black floral, which is swatched at the top. The pale yellow floral is the "highlight" fabric. I'm making two different types of blocks, and the fabrics are swatched together. I will need to buy some plain black fabric for the inner borders. This also covers my binding fabric, since I don't want the binding to stand out from the rest of the quilt.

I'm planning to start cutting my blocks on Monday, as this weekend is going to be very busy with guests visiting. Fortunately, large block quilts like this sew up really quickly, so I could potentially be finished the quilt top by the end of the week, unless I get distracted by something else (which happens on a fairly regular basis).