08 Jun Sew Solid Sunday #6

Welcome back to Sew Solid Sunday!  I hope you’ve had some fun with solid fabrics over the past month.

When I was at Quilt Market last month I had the opportunity to attend a session by Heather Jones about her new designs made from American Made Brand Solids.  These solid fabrics are all made and processed here in the United States!  American Made was kind enough to provide us all with a charm pack of the 50 colors they currently produce.  This month’s Sew Solid Sunday seemed the perfect opportunity to give them a try.

I started with my new notebook as inspiration.  That cover just screams quilt and charm pack.  Of course, I had to make a few changes, so I turned the design on its side, offset the charms and made the quilt a bit more asymmetrical than the notebook.  The American Made Brand charms were beautiful to work with.  I added some Kona Snow for the background and an unknown orange solid that I’ve had in my stash for a long time as the binding.

American Notebook

I’m calling my new quilt American Notebook.  It finishes at about 40″ square.  I cut the charms in half and sewed them together at random.  This is always a bit hard for me, but I did it!  I swear, I did NOT put them all on the design wall first as I’m so often tempted to do when working “randomly”.  I sewed some of the strips together, offsetting the charms and left two single strips.  This kind of design is perfect for solids – the colors just shine through!  Add some background, a lot of spiral quilting and there you are!

That spiral quilting is a bit tricky for the first few inches, but the effect is so worth it!  Thread decisions for a multi-colored quilt like this one can be a bit difficult for me since, in general, I prefer my quilting thread to match my quilt.  Clearly, that isn’t possible here so I chose a medium grey, Aurifil 2610, that I hoped would blend well and I think it did.

If you’d like to make your own version of American Notebook, I’ve provided some more detailed information after the linky party.

So what have you been working on?  Please don’t forget to link back to Sew Solid Sunday in your posts 🙂

American Notebook
Fabric requirements:

1.  Cut the charm squares in half.  Sew the halves together along the short ends
   at random to make 9 strips of 9 charms each.
2. Set aside two strips as Units
   A and C.  On three of the remaining
   strips, cut 2¼” off one end and sew it back onto the other end.  These strips will be ¼” shorter than the
   others.  Trim the edges even after
   quilting.
3. Beginning with a strip with full
   width charms and alternating with strips with half width charms at the ends,
   sew 3 charm strips together into Unit B.
   Sew 4 charm strips together into Unit D.
4. Trim the selvages off the background
   strips.
5. Sew the units together in the
   following order (left to right):

• 4½” background strip
• Charm strip Unit A
• 5½” background strip
• Charm strip Unit B
• 7″ background strip
• Charm strip Unit C
• 2½” background strip
• Charm strip Unit D
• 5″ background strip

7.  Quilt in a spiral quilt design or
as desired.