I hope you’ll plan to join me and 24 other quilting teachers on Feb 4 and 5 for Quilted! The Virtual Summit. We’ll be sharing our best tips, tricks and techniques on a wide range of topics. And the tickets are complimentary.
When you’re limited to one color, you’re forced to branch out. You have to use different values (lightness or darkness). And it becomes necessary to tweak the color, which is where the magic happens.
Scarlet Spin was an early experiment in one-color quilts. It includes all sorts of reds: fire engine, brick, orange-red, wine, salmon, hot pink.
For the lights, I used whites and off-whites. Many of them have little bits of red as well.
Here’s a secret: Red is the easiest color with which to make a single-hued quilt. You truly can’t mess it up as long as 1: you are brave, and 2: you think about contrast. Contrast means “difference.” There has to be a difference between the foreground and the background in order for anything to show up. The baby windmills in the block below show up nicely.
When there isn’t enough contrast, sometimes you get a block that looks like this:
And it’s even worse when I remove the lines, which is more realistic:
I started a quilt last week that uses just one color in every big block. It’s a design by Kathy Doughty and it’s in the book Making Quilts with Kathy Doughty.
I had orange fabrics out from working on a Halloween quilt, so that’s where I started. Because there’s only one color in each block, you have to find other ways to keep it interesting. I used big prints next to small prints. I went dark a few times. I wanted straight lines in some prints and curves in others.
I had red-violets out because of the same Halloween quilt, so they were next. Using a design wall (ALWAYS!) helped me to see how it was shaping up. I used various textures, stripes, circles, lights, mediums and darks. Anything to keep it interesting. I threw in a print with orange in it just because I could.
Then there’s yellow. Yellow is so bossy. It wants to push you around and it tries to take over. It’s tricky to get yellow to show up against a light background, so I dipped into deep golden prints. Lots of texture. Natural shapes like flowers and leaves against manmade shapes like squares and straight lines.
Green is another fun color to play with, as I did for my little Lucky quilt. And since you’ve read this far, here’s a link to the complimentary pattern for Lucky:
There’s more to come on all you can learn by working within single colors. Please come back soon, and until then, happy quilting!
At Kansas City Modern Quilt Guild on Oct 10, Chris Jacobs displayed her Stars and Stripes finish. The overall impact is really strong but hone in on that background piecing. It adds so much to the design! This is a complimentary pattern by Cherry Guidry. Wouldn’t it make a great Quilt of Valor?
I fell in love with Beth Gude’s quilt, too. She made blocks for an exchange one year and then created the quilt from blocks she received back from friends. Find Beth on Instagram @gudegoods.
Some of the blocks feature a large square at the center, but a few makers put patchwork there instead. This would be such a fun quilt to make! I love being able to feature larger scale prints in big patches. The design is Crumb Coat by Tara Evans @taraleequiltery.
I love the rainbow effect in Nicole Moore’s finish, above. Nicole is an AccuQuilt ambassador and she cut the Drunkard’s Path blocks with her Go! cutter.
She also brought AccuQuilt dies for a bowl cozy and a bucket hat, and she’s already made items from both. Bowl cozies for the microwave make great Christmas gifts. I use mine all the time!
Tia Curtis brought a fabulous quilt, above, that was inspired by what she sees while swimming laps: ceiling and floor tiles.
This is a beautiful piece but my photos don’t do it justice. The colors are wonderful!
And maybe my favorite of the night was this quilt by Nikki Woolsey @sassypearlquilts. Look at that quilting!
I love how it changes from one section to another. Nikki is president-elect of KCMQG and if her energy is any indication, next year will be one to remember.
Also I’m a fan of her shirt. It’s the kind of thing I’d put on for church and my husband would raise his eyebrows.
More show and tell from other guilds still to come. Quilt on, friends!
If you’re looking for dynamic programs for your quilt group, check out my offerings here!
If you attended the Conquer Your Fabric Scraps Summit and upgraded to the bundle, then a ticket to this talk is included. But if you didn’t and you’d like to come, you may purchase a ticket any time this week.
One of my interests is taking simple ideas and seeing how far I can run with them. I love designing quilts that feature just one patch, such as a brick.
In this talk, some of the things we’ll cover include:
And the best part? I’m creating a handout that will show you how the bricks are arranged for many of these ideas! You can print it and have it at your fingertips as you begin your own journey with bricks. Normally, each quilt idea would be developed into a pattern for sale, which would retail for around $12. So if you get 10 ideas worth $12 each, that’s $120 worth of content that is included with your $20 ticket to the talk.
We had some time between the StarQuar Scrap Quilts workshop and the evening program of One Hundred Small Quilts, so I got to see the quilting studio the guild has put together for making donation quilts.
And I’d love it if you’d be there. A ticket to the summit is complimentary. There will be 21 teachers all sharing their best tips, tricks, ideas and inspiration for diving into your scrap fabrics and making good use of them in wonderful ways.
You’ll find all the details and registration (it’s free!) on the Summit’s main page. I hope to see you there!
Full disclosure: You’ll be offered the option to upgrade your ticket for a fee, which gives you extended access to all of the presentations as well as a bundle of goods: patterns, classes and more. If you upgrade, I will earn a commission. But you can take in all of the Summit at no charge and it’s fine if that’s what you prefer. 😊
Early this year I decided to jump in for the Tiny Nine Patch Challenge, hosted by Taryn @reproquiltlover on Instagram. There were three sizes from which to pick and I decided on the middle size. The squares are cut at 1-1/4″ so the Nine Patch will finish at 2-1/4″ x 2-1/4″. Small enough to be super cute but not so small as to make me miserable.
A few years back I designed Petit Patchwork as a way to teach several techniques to quilters at a retreat. It was fun to make and it’s an attractive little quilt.
Fast forward to last year when I was a guest on The Quilt Show with Ricky Tims (Alex Anderson was recovering from surgery) and crew. They’d seen Petit Patchwork and invited me to design this year’s summer quilt project. When I learned how it would work, another small sampler seemed like the right choice. And that’s how Summer Splash was born.
I’m Diane Harris and I think of myself as a scrap quilt specialist. I like to let the fabric do the work! My patchwork is usually simple. The way the fabrics play together is a little more complex, but totally achievable if you know a few tricks!
Star Silhouettes is a simple design that packs a punch. It’s made from just one patch size and it features a little unit I call a StarQuar because it’s one-fourth of a basic star block.
It appeared on the cover of American Patchwork & Quilting’s August ’22 issue, and you can still get the pattern here.
I designed Lingering Effects in response to a rough patch I went through coming out of the pandemic. The idea behind the red crosses was “send help.” I almost gave up on that border but now I think it’s the most striking feature of the quilt. This design appeared on the cover of Quiltmaker’s Jan/Feb ’24 issue. You can get the pattern from the publisher here.
This quilt, made by Becki in Arlington, Texas, was one of my favorites. She worked with third graders after a guild friend hosted a similar project for her grandchildren.
It exudes joy and I fell in love with it. Becki is on the left during show and tell at the Trinity Valley Quilters’ Guild meeting, where I shared One Hundred Small Quilts.
Becki observed that it was pretty easy to tell which blocks were made by girls and which ones were by the boys. I think that’s a fascinating part of human nature.
My favorite brick sizes are listed below as finished size first, followed by the dimensions you’ll need to cut the patches.
The tiniest patch above is cut 1″ x 1-1/2″ to finish at 1/2″ x 1″. It is little!!
The largest patch above is cut 4-1/2″ x 8-1/2″. The largest brick I have ever used was cut 6-1/2″ x 12-1/2″. It was used in a 24″ block.
To figure out your own custom brick sizes, first think about the finished dimensions you want, for instance, you want a brick that’s 9″ long. Since it has to be twice as long as wide, half of 9 is 4-1/2.
So you know the brick will finish 4-1/2″ x 9″. NOW add 1/2″ to each of those numbers to get the cut size. In this case the cut size would be 5″ x 9-1/2″.
One of the first bricks quilt I ever made featured Baby Windmill blocks. I created darker windmills to get the effect of “borders” for this design I call Framework.
Somehow this helps to organize all the scrappy chaos and the quilt is more pleasing to the eye than it would be without the false borders.
When the patchwork is very small like this, you can use all types of cotton quilt fabric together: reproductions, batiks, florals, novelty and so on.
I use contrast in most of the blocks so that the windmill is easily visible. Most blocks outside of the border areas have a windmill that is darker than the background.
The windmills in Framework are made from patches cut 1-1/2″ x 2-1/2″. Each block finishes at 4″. You can find instructions for these little blocks in my Baby Windmills basic tutorial post.
Here’s another small quilt made from Baby Windmills. It’s called Christmas Dance. I went scrappy within a limited palette. This is a very entertaining kind of sewing!
