I feel like I have a lot of fabric. The design wall in the corner of the picture is hung on the back of a row of IKEA bookshelves which are full of fabric, and fabric has spilled over onto other shelves and into containers on the floor. Admittedly a lot of it is rather elderly, much of it dating back to some quilting holidays in America in the late 90s and early noughties.
So you would think I wouldn't have a lot of trouble pulling fabric together for a new project, which is a free quilt pattern called 'Let's Bake' by Lori Holt. She hosted free tutorials on her website a while back and I kept up with them, and there is a Let's Bake Sew Along Guide which contains the cutting instructions and fabric list. Her finished quilt looks like this:
I thought it was quite cute so I saved the pattern for my queue. Having recently completed the top for the 30s Sampler, it seemed like a good time to tackle this pattern in similar fabric colours because I had my 30s fabrics to hand.
Now I had not reckoned with the marketing juggernaught driving this pattern line. The entire pattern is presented on the basis that you will buy all of the designer's fabrics, make the applique shapes using the designer's packaged plastic templates and sew with them with the designer-brand interfacing, then embroider said shapes with the designer-brand thread, before assembling your quilt and finishing it with the designer-brand trim. Trying to work out how to make the quilt without buying any of that has proved quite a challenge. The Sew Along Guide has thumbnails of all the fabric, and there is a LOT of fabric: 54 fabrics in total. Presumably to work in a bit of all the designer's fabric lines? My printed copy of the guide (thank you office laser printer) isn't very true to colour but I did my best to work my way through the fabric list and pull suitable fabrics from my stash.
I thought I had a lot of these bubblegum colours in my stash. Well I can tell you now that I do not have nearly enough for 54 variations. Even resorting to stealing fabrics from wildly different stashes like my Edyta Sitar fabrics, an American Jane jelly roll, a couple of other Moda jelly rolls, my fat quarter stash pile and some of the elderly fabric buys, I still have had to double up on a few fabrics. In particular, I do not have the lovely aqua blues that she used. I did manage to pull together some painter-blues. In general, I think my fabrics are going to be a bit darker in value. We'll see how it goes.
So having trashed the sewing room and having spent almost two hours re-folding and putting fabric away, I started cutting. Each of the 54 fabrics has a specified cutting list, sometimes just a couple of pieces, sometimes half a dozen. I have now put in about four hours on cutting and I'm still only just over half way. It's slow as you can't batch cut, each fabric has to be individually unfolded, pressed, then cut out the specified shapes, then add each shape to a separate labelled baggie (mixer, flour sifter, cookie sheet etc). I will eventually have cut little kits for each applique motif on the quilt.
The next challenge will be drawing out the applique shapes without owning the designer's plastic templates. The sewing guide does show the shapes as small thumbnails, so I will just have to work out the easiest way to scale them up to the specified size.
Eventually I will get to sew something.
You can appreciate that I haven't done a lot else this week. I've been pricking out a lace pattern ready for an upcoming lace day, knitting on a chunky jacket, crocheting a bit on the crochet granny square afghan, and continuing the handquilting on the 25 block applique quilt (very slow progress). I haven't been doing much commuter knitting lately as I am mostly using commute time to study Japanese now that my course has started again.
Are you tackling any gargantuan projects?
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