Hello and welcome to Patches of Blues quilt along!
My name is Edyta Sitar, the Quilter behind Laundry Basket Quilts, and I look forward to quilting with you. I have made many quilts but this is my first quilt along, so please be patient with me. 🙂
This is the quilt that we will be making! It is a sampler from the patterns in our new book Patches of Blue. I will be posting a new blog on the 15th of every month showcasing a new section of the quilt. This quilt is made with our new collection of fabric called Something Blue – unfortunately this fabric will not be available until June 2018 so we will be making our quilts with some of my previous fabric collections.
All that you need is; the Patches of Blue book for cutting directions, fabrics, and your basic sewing supplies. With every block, I am hoping to share some fun tips and ideas with you.
Let’s start by choosing fabrics! You will need a nice selection of blues and lights. Before I start a quilt, I pick a stash (a kit) for myself – a basket full of dark, medium, and light colored blues as well as a group of lights with little blue accents for my backgrounds.
If you’re a bit short on blue fabrics, visit your local quilt shop to grab some yardage, or we have some nice Winter Blues and Winter Lights fabric bundles on our website to get you started.
Now, from that basket, we will pick 6 blues and 6 lights in 10″ squares for our first block. Try to remember my rule of 5 when choosing fabrics.
“Rule of 5; big print, medium print, small print, stripes, and polka dots”.
I not only pay attention to the shades of color but also to the print that is on the fabric, we also want to mix batiks and prints into our basket to give extra contrast to our quilt.
This will be our stash (kit) that we will be picking fabric from for all of our blocks. It is also good to repeat some of the same fabrics through all blocks so they have similar DNA and look like they belong together when put into the final quilt.
If your fabrics are ready, you can take a little break before we start on January 15. Don’t forget to share your pictures with me on Instagram and Facebook with the hashtag #patchesofblue.
Happy Quilting and I can’t wait to quilt-along with you! Edyta