Lightning Strike

Each year in January I like to start a new Kaffe Fassett quilt.  This year I chose Lightning Strike from Quilts on an English Farm.  

When I made Kaffe quilts I like to take inspiration from the books, and use fabrics that I already have in my stash.  I love mixing up older prints with the new ones.  

This pattern is just giant half square triangles but the placement gives the quilt real movement.  

I love a soft, hand quilted quilt with wool batting and that's what I've done here.  I quilted the whole quilt with a variegated Aurifil 12wt thread and I love the result.  

Name: Lightning Strike    

size: 90" x 72"

backing: Tree Fungi by Kaffe Fassett Collective

The non retirement quilt

I'm squeezing in one more finish before the end of the year and then my next blog post will be my annual wrap up. 

This quilt was designed and made for friend and work colleague. We gave it to her this week and she was thrilled.  

It possibly looks a bit washed out in these photos but it's bright!!

It's all 6" finished half square triangles but the placement works so well with these strong colours.  

I had this one long arm quilted at Busy Bee Quilt shop in Wellington.  The backing is a Kaffe Fassett wideback.  

I showed it at Capital Quilters guild meeting with my own purple/green version from quite a few years ago.  

The finished size is 60" x 60".

Crazy

And I have another finish to share with you.  I'm calling this one "Crazy" because it sends your eyes a bit crazy as you try to pick out the pattern.  However, I chose a very clever motif for the long arm quilting and that may help you to see the blocks.  (Garden Trellis 4 by House of Creations)

I purchased this Kaffe Fassett Marquee Stripe fabric at one of our guild sales days and I didn't have a lot to play with. this is all of the blocks I could make from what I had.  And it's long out of print now.

I couldn't find a fabric in my stash to complement the top, so the next best option is to go opposites so I went for beautiful Cactus Flower - also by Kaffe Fassett Collective. 

I showed the early stages of this quilt back in July, and I had actually forgotten about it until I stumbled across it a few weeks ago.   Fortunately I still had enough of the teal stars to do the binding in the same fabric.  I'm very happy with that decision, although I did consider a black stripe for a while. 

The Shiraz stripe in the border triangles is from Kaffe Fassett Collective too. 

My Crazy quilt is 50" x 60" so it could be used as a lap quilt of on a single bed. 

Crazy Cutting Corners

I'm back! 

I haven't been away, but I've been super busy with work, cricket admin and quilt guild admin.  I've hardly had any time for sewing lately, but I decided to fix that this week and I finally made time to pick up my rotary cutter.  

I'd been thinking about using some of my Kaffe Fassett stripes so I browsed through some of my older Kaffe books and came upon this pattern from Kaffe Quilts Again (2012):

I only had the Marquee fabric in the lighter shades so mine looked like this:

random

some diamonds forming

Diamonds!

and even more diamonds

I'm going to add a pieced border, but I don't have much of the Marquee stripe left so I'll have to use something else.  I'll be sure to post another photo when I've got the top together.  

 

Stone Flower

Hello!!  I'm back and I've got a finished top to show you.  

I'm calling it Stone Flower because the fabric in the centre is the Stone Flower wide back by Kaffe Fassett Collective. Here's how it evolved over a short period of time back in April 2023.

Another wide back by Kaffe Fassett Collective

mixed in with Cactus Flower in blue

I took elements of the Blue Square Dance pattern from Kaffe's Quilts in the Cotswolds book and used them to expand on my fussy cut Stone Flower centre piece.  But I stopped when I got to the final border because I didn't fancy the labour intensive border shown in the book.  So it sat on the shelf for nine months.  

Then January 2024 rolled around and I decided to finish some more WIPs. So I browsed through the book and spotted the triangle border on the Flowery Jar pattern and decided to use that border instead.  I wanted to bring out the green again so I found an Alison Glass print that was just the right shade of green and I used that. 

I couldn't decide if I liked the green triangles pointing in or out, but I went with my original plan and have pointed them out.  It feels like there's more green showing when I point them out and that's what I wanted.  

Now it's finished and ready for long arm quilting.  I've already got 4 quilts in my hand quilting pile so this one is going straight to the long arm quilter.  I intend to use it as an everyday quilt.  It will replace my very thin Kaffe jelly roll quilt that I made about 10 years ago.