Several week ago I was sent this fab bundle of the Scandinavia collection by Oakshott. I had been chatting to Michael and we both agreed we would love to see how my prints would work over Oakshott shot cotton fabrics.
I printed over them before I had thought out what I was going to do...that's normally my way...I used my Flowerbed design as I wanted to print a design that would leave a lot of the beautiful Oakshott fabric showing through.
I kept them on my desk a while until I was sure what I wanted to do with them. They were far too precious to make a mistake and cut into with the wrong decision. I have done that too many times before.
As soon as I came across this beautiful Kaleidoscope block in Joyce Gieszler's book Then and Now Quilts, I kneew this would be perfect.
It is a paper pieced pattern which is a process I have actually grown to love. Once you get your head around the back to front piecing it really is quite ok. What's more, being a rather slap dash piecer I would never ordinarily get such precise piecing without paper piecing. As long as you follow the lines you can't go too far wrong.
Joyce's layout with the Kaleidoscope blocks is so lovely to watch as secondary and tertiary patterns emerge.
The next decision was how to quilt this mini. IG peeps gave great suggestions but they were either beyond my quilting skills, or took too long with suggestions of hand quilting...I'm way too impatient to see something finished for that.
I settled on the idea of a matchstick spiral to accentuate the general circular pattern that the design made. This turned out to be a good decision as the spiral shape not only kept the quilt nice and taught, preventing it getting misshapen, and also flattened any suspect piecing.
Final decision was binding...I printed up the remainder pieces of Oakshott with my new Smock Top design. Not being able to decide which to use I just printed up the lot...the remainder will always come in handy for other projects I am sure.
After some umming and ahhing, possibly making it scrappy and using a bit of each, I eventually decided to keep it neutral and use the Uppsala. I was so pleased I did. It is such a gentle, but interesting, non threatening colour.
I only had a small piece of the fabric so I used Kerry's fab tutorial for single fold binding. I think I may be a convert to this method...it used half the fabric...what's not to love?
All in all this was a thoroughly enjoyable project. I don't often use other people's patterns, but I really loved doing this one. I had reduced it from the original template to make a wall hanging and I am thinking about enlarging the template next time to make a wonderful double bedsize throw. My Robert Kaufman collection is due to land here any day now and I am thinking this pattern would be perfect to showcase them.
As for the original bundle of Scandinavia shot cottons...what a dream they were to print on and sew with...I will certainly be doing that again.
