Sunday, June 3, 2012

Coffee Lover's Delight part 1

After a lot of knitting, I've finally started working on a quilt. Much easier to share when it's in progress than a weird bit of knitting on the needles. This quilt is inspired by Mary Lane Brown's "Road to Tennessee." Her tutorial for the block is wonderful so if you want to know how to make the blocks check out this site: http://www.modabakeshop.com/2011/08/road-to-tennessee.html

One of the variations Mary suggests is Xs and Os. When I saw that I immediately thought of Moda's line Java. At first I tried laying out my blocks by color.



It looked cute, but I wasn't totally happy with it. I tried mixing up my blocks and giving it a more scrappy look. I absolutely love this layout.


One trick I've learned with quilting is to take a black and white picture once you have your layout finalized. This lets you see how well everything balances.



I really want the Xs and Os to pop so I've decided to do some brown sashing between my blocks with white corner stones. When I was shopping for my brown fabric I found a few more Java charm packs. I think that my quilt is very heavy on the blues and light on the dark colors so I'm going add 10 more blocks to get a little more variety of color. If you make this quilt one charm pack will give you 10 blocks. I enjoy having my blocks with two matching colors in each block so I'm going to be using 4 charm packs, but I'll have one charm pack left over. (Don't worry, I've already got plans for that one.)