Thursday morning I leave for Oregon to attend the first FAB Quilting Retreat. The quilt that we are going to work on is Strip Twist from G.E. Designs. This is the pattern jacket.
I started out with two fat quarter packs of soft pastel blues, greens, and pinks. I have since changed my mind on what fabric I want to make my version of Strip Twist from. While organizing my fabric cupboard, I became re-acquainted with a fabulous chicken/rooster print that was in my stash. This is a picture of that print with my rotary cutter in the picture to show the scale of the birds.
I have now decided to use this print as the border on my Strip Twist quilt. The blocks are all going to be made from the many colours taken from the birds in the print. All of the strips that I have cut for my blocks so far have come from my stash.
These are the strips that I have cut so far. As you can see from the picture, there are more green strips than any other colour. I guess that is no surprise since my favorite colour is green and I have more green fabrics in my stash than any other colour. LOL The wild rust and green print on the bottom of the picture was part of a basket of fabric and notions that I won at our guild’s quilt show last year. it is a little out there, but the colours work so in it goes. I am trying to follow some of the guidelines that Alex Anderson uses when making her quilts.I needed to test the pattern to figure out how many blocks I could get out of a strip of fabric. The pattern says you should get 4 blocks from a strip of fabric. I tried a couple of different strips of fabric and find that I can get only 3 blocks from some strips (just a tad short) and I can get 4 blocks from others. I may run out of the chicken wire fabric (that I am using for my light) before anything else. I want to make my quilt bed size – preferably queen. Although this project is a little “planned”, it will also be somewhat driven by the number of blocks I can get out of that chicken wire print. I may pull a backup light from my stash if I need to squeeze in a few more blocks.
This is a very cute pattern and the construction is simple. The pattern is solely made from 2.5 inch strips. That narrow light strip is cleverly constructed after sewing 2.5 inch strips together into stratas of 3 strips and then making a secondary cut. The blocks also make use of the partial seam method which avoids set in seams. It will be fun to see this same pattern in the fabric choices of the other FABs.
