First Light Designs

And just like that, I have a finished quilt top:

I am loving it with the addition of the borders! I started with a half-inch strip of a print from my stash that is not part of the “High Street” line and then added a six-inch strip from the line that was not intended for the border at all.

Let me explain.

After starting this quilt with a Jelly Roll — 40 2½” strips of the entire “High Street” line of fabric — it occurred to me I might want to add borders. Having no yardage on hand, I did a search of the Internet and came up with one of the large florals that I thought would be perfect. I also found a small-ish floral print on a grey background that I thought would work nicely on the back. (I felt really lucky to find any yardage at all because “High Street” was very popular when it came out several years ago; there’s not much for sale anywhere now.)

Here’s a close-up of the two pieces I found:

Mercy! Given how busy the interior of the quilt turned out to be, can you imagine what it would look like surrounded by that large tangerine floral? Let’s not even go there!

When I auditioned the grey floral, I was amazed to see that it actually calmed down the busy-ness of the interior. At least that’s how it seems to me. Do you agree?

Here’s a close-up of the half-inch accent strip:

It reads as a solid from a distance but up close you can see it adds a subtle touch of texture against the striations in the grey containment border and the blossoms in the outer border.

The quilt top, now measuring 56½” square, is based on the free pattern Tea Time in Bali by Larene Smith. Initially I was toying with the idea of naming my quilt Ice Cream Social because the fabrics remind me of rainbow sherbet and fruit sorbets. They still do but the name doesn’t seem to fit anymore with my revised layout. What do you think of Tea Time on High Street?

After sewing the second of eight strip sets for my current Work-in-Progress, I had a small “aha!” moment (although maybe it should be called a “duh!” moment). You’ll remember from my last post that I’m working with a Jelly Roll, in this case 40 2½”-wide strips of fabric from Lily Ashbury’s “High Street” line . . .

. . . to make a quilt called Tea Time. The pattern by Larene Smith describes a clever way of sewing strip sets into tubes and cutting the tubes into triangles which open up to yield squares. The squares are then joined together to make a scrappy quilt.

Each strip set is made with five fabrics. Because of the manner in which the triangles are cut after being sewn into a tube, the blocks come out in one of two ways. The first way is a block containing (predictably) five strips, with the middle strip running through the center of the block, like this one . . .

I’m calling the ones cut this way the A blocks.

The B blocks contain six strips, because the middle strip gets cut in half and each half ends up on the outer edges of the block. There’s a seam bisecting the block, like this one:

Initially I had been quite spontaneous in choosing my strip sets, just wanting to make sure each set had a pink, yellow, orange, green, and grey strip. I assumed that the strip in the number 3 position would be in the middle of the block. It is — but as you can see from the photos above, that applies to only half the blocks. It didn’t dawn on me right away that the fabrics in the 1 and 5 positions would wind up in the middle of the block in the other half. Hello!

Armed with this new knowledge, I took a second look at my arrangement of remaining strip sets — in particular the fabrics in the 1 and 5 positions — and wound up rearranging them. Several times. So much for spontaneity!

Here are my final fabric combinations:

(These strips were cut from the end of the tubes after the triangles were cut and I had opened up the last seam.)

This is such a delicious combination of fabrics. You know what comes to mind when I look at these colors? Rainbow sherbet. Blackberry sorbet. Green tea ice cream. That led to my second “aha” moment: I’m going to name this quilt Ice Cream Social.