A Prairie Home Quilts

Back in January, Tonya [The Unruly Quilter AKA:  LazyGalQuilting] started on online get together where we were to create a quilt using liberated techniques based on an Amish quilt design of our choice.  Our finished quilts were to include letters somewhere on the front.

I finally settled on this quilt as my inspiration.  I had some solids from the Michael Miller Krystal line but none of the colors that I had seemed suitable to my design.  I was trying to order fabric online and kept adding more and more colors to my cart; ending up with way more fabric than I needed for this project.  I decided I needed to set some parameters for color choices. Many of the color names were foods so first I added all the food named colors to my cart.  There were too many greens so I decided to put just the fabric colors named for fruit.  [Okay, so my mind works in bizarre ways but I say --  whatever works.] I ended up with citron, olive, raspberry, wine, grape, blueberry, plum, papaya, mandarin, mango and pomegranate — olive because I wanted two greens and wine…   well, a glass of wine goes well with anything.  Oh, and black for one border and the stripes in the HST.

This is the EQ6 file that I did for my initial design idea.  It’s not an exact duplicate of the idea I had in mind but helped me see how my color choices were going to look together.  After getting my fabrics with all the fruity names, I decided to call this quilt “Tutti Fruitti.”  My initial idea included putting the quilt name, Liberated Amish 2010, my name, and town/state in the borders.

As I was fondling fabric, my design idea morphed.  I loved the bright colors against the black so decided instead to make one, larger black border instead of using the wine color.  And then there were those fruity names…  just so much more fun than name, rank and serial number, don’t you think?

So there you have it — the color of fruit.  Now bip on over to the Liberated Amish 2010 Get Together to see what everyone else has been up to.  There are quite a few finished projects.  [Yes, I better get a move on!] If you’re inspired to try some strip pieced letters, Tonya has a book coming out in December and Brenda [Scraps and Strings] has a tutorial here.