I’m devoting an entire entry to charm packs… that’s how excited I am about them, right now.
What’s a Charm Pack? It’s a stack of 35-40 5″ squares from a collection of a designer’s series. They all ‘match’ because they’re from the same series. This drastically reduces my cutting time, and I really don’t like cutting at all… so that means I love charm packs 
Shopping for them is rough, though.. because I want them all! I have decided that the Fat Quarter Shop (clicky the link to see their awesome selection) has the best selection of charm packs that I’ve found so far. I bought 3 from them, which should be getting here today. I should have bought 2 of each, now that I realize I’ll likely need more than one charm pack to make a decent sized quilt. What I love about these babies is that they’re $7-9 for 35-40 5″ squares. That means I can make a full sized quilt for about $15 + solids, which I can get on sale at non-quilting stores.
That brings me to my point. I ran up to the quilting shop that is right around the corner from my house - Ready to Sew. I was so excited when I found that they had taken over the space next door and had nearly doubled their shop space. This place is literally 5 minutes from my house, and considering I live so far out of town that nothing is 5 minutes away, you can imagine how happy this makes me.
After I ordered the charm packs from Fat Quarter Shop, I decided too grab a couple from Ready to Sew and get started on one of the quilts I had been tossing around in my mind (charm pack quilt, see previous entry with inspiration pieces.)
I’m really trying not to be one of those people who calls their fabrics by name, but it does help to know the names so I can purchase more, online if necessary. These are the two I bought on Saturday:
Here’s the quilt top I started on Saturday from the Nest charm pack:
I had to supplement the charm pack with a few 5″ squares from my stash because I wanted to try a little bigger quilt this time. I used cheap white fabric, which will likely ruin this quilt once I wash it. Last night I pieces together a backing, using solid teal, solid yellow, and one of the prints I used from my stash. I started the quilting, I’m almost done.
New techniques:
Sashing! I totally dove into this one, I have seen so many quilts with borders around the blocks and I didn’t know how to do it. Now I do! It’s easy as pie.
Quilt Border. I wanted to add a five inch border, and it was a little tricky because my quilt was already 44×44, so if I didn’t cut on the bias, I’d have to piece the border together and it wouldn’t look as good. I sat down and thought about it for awhile and realized that I could add a 5″ square on the corners, in white, and that would work.
Quilting from the center. I realized with the border, I didn’t want to start my quilting from the edge, but from where each row started. This was tricky because I probably should have pulled the bobbin thread up, but I didn’t. I guess we’ll see how it turns out..
Pieced backing. I just can’t seem to make myself use that much of one fabric on the backing. So, I dug into my stash and pieced it. I’ve been wanting to try this anyway, and it seems like the hip thing to do
I was still too scared to try free motion quilting. I did a lot of reading on it though and I think I’m going to take the advice of many out there and create a test sandwich to play around on, then I won’t be ruining a quilt when I screw it up.
Richard would ask me what I was doing quite often during this process and my reply was, as always.. “I have no clue!”
But it was most certainly a lot of fun. Can’t wait to finish it.
