My First Quilt: Selecting a Pattern
When I finally decided to 100% jump in and make my first quilt, the pattern had been pretty much already decided on. Months ago, my Grandma sent me a photo of a quilt top her friend had just pieced together with a note that it’s a simple pattern I might like. Long story short, I did like it! But to be honest, I had no real commitment to making a quilt back then and just filed the photo away in my “projects I’d like to do one day” memory bank.
But here we are, at the start of my first quilt (you can see my Meet the Quilter post for how I got here) and I have a pattern and an idea!
The pattern is a simple block pattern that requires 8.5″ squares. This is a great pattern for a beginner because it focuses on skill building, and should be relatively quick to piece together. A tip my Grandma passed along was to chain the blocks together into rows across, and then piece the rows together. That seems so logical and straightforward to me now… but I naively thought I was going to be making a lot of plus signs and then stitching them together. I have a lot to learn about piecing!
I did alter the pattern. I am feeling ambitious and also need (lol, “need”) a new quilt for our queen size bed so I increased the pattern size to be 11 blocks by 11 blocks (it should be about 90″ x 90″ completed). I also added a sixth fabric color to the mix and played around with the arrangements of the various colors, placing them in an order that I felt was more pleasing to the eye.
Side Note: The only “design” program I have currently have on my laptop is Adobe Photoshop, and let me tell you… trying to build out a pattern and color it in Photoshop was awful (see below wonky markup). I’m going to have to find a better program for future quilt patterns.
I’m excited to head to a quilt shop and pick out fabric! As you can see, I’m going for a mostly neutral palette with black and mustard yellow for contrast. Using a yardage calculator I found online, I’ll need 1.5 – 2 yards of each color. I don’t have any fabric stash at this point, and I’m seeing dollar signs already but, hey, I’m all in at this point. Let’s go! I CAN’T WAIT!
