I recently finished one of my oldest WIPs, started in Spring of 2012. This quilt has a long story. I was a new quilter and I had just joined the Central Jersey Modern Quilt Guild and signed up for my very first workshop with Kaffe Fassett.
I was so new to quilting that I did not even have a fabric stash or had never heard of Kaffe Fassett. Apparently the quilt was all about playing with color, mostly large florals was what I had taken away from theme of the workshop. We needed to bring 20-30 fat quarters of large to small scale floral fabric.
I had not yet discovered online fabric shopping and bought most of my fabric at a local fabric store on Route 22 in NJ. They carried a lot of traditional quilting fabric along with some Amy Butler fabric. I loved her fabric and picked up pretty much a fat quarter each of everything they had in stock. I imagined the color theme of the quilt to be blue, green and yellow and shopped accordingly. Armed with my now a large collection of blue, green and yellow fabric I showed up for the workshop.
This is where the it went down hill for me. I had no idea Kaffe Fassett had his own extensive collection of fabric or that he was such a prolific quilt maker. I was the only one at the workshop with non Kaffe fabric. Most others were fully aware of his extensive body of work which I was just discovering at the workshop. My stack of fabrics did not have enough color variation and just did not have that oomph that the pattern required. At the end of the day I had come up with this. I even bought some more fabric at the workshop that had pops of pink and red in it which brought some variation to my set of fabrics.
This arrangement on the design wall did not resonate with me and I was not sure I had it in me to complete the quilt. I brought home the pieces I had cut out along with the rest of the fabric and it just lay there as I had no idea what to do with it.
As my quilting skills grew over the years and I became more proficient with color and value in quilts I knew the only way to tackle this is to pick a pattern where I would cut up the fabric in small pieces. The big bold prints would bring a lot of movement and color variation to the quilt. Then I was on a look out for a quilt pattern that required a lot of small pieces when I saw the Tinsel quilt pattern by Cotton and Steel in a quilting catalog.
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Then I cut up all the fabric and here is my version of quilt.
The variations in color along with the pops of red gives it a nice movement. I did orange peel quilting as the 2" squares provide a nice grid for the peels. Added a candy stripe binding to give it an extra pop of color. I backed it with a vintage sheet that I have been hoarding for a while now. Also added a label on the binding.
It is a fairly large quilt at 84" x 84" and is already being put to good use at home. It is a constant reminder of how far I have come with my skills.
