Blog / screen-printed fabric
collaborating with cotton & flax
Sometime last year, I connected with Erin Dollar, the designer behind Cotton & Flax, an LA-based home goods company. Erin creates awesome surface patterns from simple repeating shapes, which she silk-screens onto linen-cotton fabrics.
In addition to creating the free Double Dash quilt pattern for her first fabric collection for Robert Kaufman Fabrics, I've also been working with her leftover screen-printed scraps to create new quilts (like this flying geese wall quilt). The two log cabin baby quilts pictured here are my latest work made from Erin's scraps; in this case, I worked solely with her designs printed on a flax-colored/natural linen-cotton blend.
This first quilt features her designs printed in black, paired with strips of cream and white, and squares of solid peach, to form four Courthouse Step blocks. Each block was pieced improvisationally using strips of various widths, so each block is unique and varies in size and shape.
This second quilt features Erin's patterns printed in white, and the fabric strips are arranged in a much more orderly and uniform fashion to form four log cabin blocks. The layout is the same as the one I used to create this neutral log cabin baby quilt earlier this year. Each of the blocks' centers feature a unique, warm-colored solid.
I really enjoy the act of working from scraps---making design decisions on the fly since I'm limited to the fabric that's in front of me---so I really loved the process of making both of these quilts and am so happy with how they turned out.
Both of these quilts are now available in the shop, if you'd like to take a look. And you can read more about this collaboration in Erin's write-up from last spring.
All photos by Jane Cuthbertson of Gray Green Goods.
maker maker wall quilt
framed houses baby quilt
gray + cream flying geese baby quilt
2016 umbrella prints trimming competition
This year, I'm so excited to once again participate in the Umbrella Prints Trimmings Competition, an annual sewing competition to transform a pack of scraps from the Australian fabric company into something fun. (You can see my 2013 entry here, and my 2012 entry here.)
As many of you know, my husband and I recently purchased our first home, so I set out to make a wall quilt from the trimmings to hang above our new bed. I took an improvisational approach to making this quilt, allowing the trimmings themselves to dictate the size of the blocks and the width and number of strips I created from each. I paired the trimmings with white and cream solids from my stash, and built of up each block until it was a uniform 8.5" square.
After assembling the top, I basted the quilt and quilted it with matchstick lines, something I tend to reserve only for small quilts since it's a time-consuming process (but well worth it!).
The quilting lines bend and pivot, creating right angles throughout the quilt. I also left a few rectangular areas unquilted to mimic the strips and vary the texture of the top.
For both the binding and the backing, I used a pretty peach-and-mustard print by Carolyn Friedlander that coordinated perfectly with the scraps, which I picked up in a fabric shop on a recent trip to Michigan.
I'm so happy with how this quilt turned out, and I'm most excited to have our new bedroom finally start to come together!
Voting for the competition opens on June 1, and I can't wait to see what everyone else has created! If you'd like to vote for your favorite entries, simply re-pin, like, or comment on them on this Pinterest board until June 6. Happy pinning!
