Bramble Blooms QAL

I’m joining a quilt a long. Yup, I literally never do this, because I just like to do my own thing. I have too many of my own ideas and it never works for me to follow along with schedules. BUT, this one is different. First of all, it’s started by QuiltyFolk. I’ve followed her for years and love her special and talented style. I’m gonna share a few of her quilts here that are favourites of mine, just to show you why I”m doing this quilt along.

Impressed yet? Ya, that’s what I thought! Completely original and whimsical and wonderful. She uses a mix of patchwork and free hand appliqué, and this quilt along is focusing on medallion style quilts. Her first instructions were to make a big stack of fabrics that felt outdated or that weren’t your favourites anymore. Then divide that into three stacks and we’ll be making three different quilts. There’s really very little info about what exactly we’ll be making, but I know it will be good, and I’ll enjoy the process!

This is the stack I came up with. I purposely chose fabrics that even though I still like, I just never reach for. This means they’ve been sitting there for awhile and I’d be fine with using them up. They’re all pretty bright, which isn’t a surprise to me as I used to prefer brighter colours and have slowly moved towards richer and warmer tones.

So… this stack does not really enthuse me that much in itself. Which is exactly what it’s supposed to be apparently! I am excited to see if I can make something I really like from these fabrics!

So the next instruction was to divide this stack into three similar stacks. I guess we’re making three quilts! I’m loving this even more, because I think we’re gonna be exploring and diving into a series which I’ve always liked the idea of. I’ve always thought I’d like to choose a theme of one block or something and then just squeeze out all the variation I could from that one block. So anyways, I divided this bunch into three stacks. (oh and added a few more from the stash as I went of course)

For the first stack, I took the most creamy/warm/muted of the bunch. I chose some from the black and white, some from the pink, some from the blue and some from the yellow. So here’s my stack for the first quilt and I already made my first assignment from this.

A pieced background square. Somewhere in the size from 20″-25″. I made mine slightly rectangular as it’s more likely to end up a rectangular quilt then. I can’t wait for the next step!

Here’s my next two stacks. I just divided the remaining fabric in half and here’s what I got! So each of these piles will make a quilt, Most of the pieces are half yard or less, so it should be interesting! If you want to step outside your comfort zone a bit and make quilts that are completely your own idea… then here’s your chance!