Small Lap Quilt top
Tula Pink’s new line by Free Spirit, “Tula’s True Colors” was recently released. When Bits ‘n Pieces, a favorite quilt shop in Pelham, NH, showed the fabrics at one in one of their regular unboxing videos, I ordered 2 packs of 5 inch charm squares. (Charm Packs: A stack of 5 inch, or sometimes 10 inch, squares of every color in a fabric line).
I was up for an simple experiment. I decided to see what happened if I put one stack of charm squares right side up and the other upside down and just sew them together as I picked the fabrics up from each stack. I did add a 5 inch square of a very pale Kona® cotton after 5 blocks of the charm pack. The diagonal lines look white, but they really are pink.
The stacks met in the greens! I did swap around a few blocks so that I didn’t get identical squares next to each other. I had fun sewing up this simple quilt, but when I got done and looked at it, my reaction was—-Hum.
Here’s the quilt right after the sewed all the squares together.
It just wasn’t cohesive. I was hoping the plain diagonals would give the random blocks some definition, but the light color didn’t do that. Considering how bright most of Tula’s fabrics are, i’m not sure what color would have worked better.
So I thought about it for a week. The “Fairy Dust” design in this line has tiny circles, concentric circles and stars. (If you look back at last week’s post, The Sleepy Dragon Baby© is lying on this fabric in the top photo). I decided to pick up one of those elements and using that to create some appliques. So I added 7 circles of varying sizes from fabric I had left over from another quilt I’d just made using “Tula’s True Colors.”
This project reminded why I usually don’t enjoy using every color in a fabric line. But the circles definitely make the quilt more interesting.
I think quilting this piece has to potential to add more interest to this quilt.
Next week I’ll show you a quilt I made from this fabric line where I made very deliberate decisions about my choice of fabrics.