Learning about YOUR personal style + Falling Slowly Quilt - in progress

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what my own style is. There are so many colors I like and so many different looks too.

I don’t consider myself traditional, but I’m not very modern either. Somewhere in the middle, maybe?

I do like modern quilts and I do like traditional quilts.

I read somewhere once that if you aren’t inspired to make a quilt for a particular reason that all you are doing is building or showing off your skills. It’s the quilts with meaning that are the best.

While I get the writer’s point, I don’t agree with it. Sometimes I’m inspired by something as simple as a color palette. Sometimes just one single illustration on a fabric. All of my quilts are meaningful to me. The ones just like the one I’m working on now and the ones that might have a message to them.

Some things I’ve learned about myself:

I prefer scrappy low volume over solid white almost every day of the week. It doesn’t really matter to me if it changes the look of the quilt. I prefer it.
When there is a little bit of wonk or non-symmetry in the quilt, I’ll tend to look at the quilt longer. And find that part cool and beautiful. It will hold my attention.
I prefer quilts with a lot of paleness about them. I don’t mean not any color. I do love colors, but I like them best balanced with low volume fabrics. Plus, I feel like they take better pictures.

I make a lot of quilts that are custom from my shop where I let my customers choose their own fabrics. So sometimes my own personal style doesn’t show as obviously.

Have you recognized your personal style? I think if you did it would really keep you on track with buying the RIGHT fabric, and not buying up everything just because you think it’s pretty. Look over your quilt pictures and see what you like best. I need to really start practicing this more often.

For the past month or so, I’ve been designing my Falling Slowly quilt. I wanted hourglass-ish blocks, separated with lots of colors at the top of the quilt and then fading or falling down to paleness. That was the idea.

Being me, I chose to do that ‘paleness’ in low volume. The color part of the quilt was to be done in my Liberty fabric stash from Ava & Neve. I’ve mentioned being a member of the Liberty Society several times, but I’m SO excited about it! These little colorful stashes of tiny florals showing up in my mailbox each month makes me ridiculously happy. And I really like and want to support small businesses anyway, but even more so that I am also a small business.

Back to the quilt pattern….

This quilt comes together pretty quickly. There are no difficult steps. It’s easy peasy. I did make it all block based, so you don’t have to worry about sashing or borders. Plus, it’s chain piece friendly. I chain pieced every single step and knocked it out in almost a day.

If you are a member of Liberty Society, those pieces were perfectly for the prints, but also works well with layer cakes if you have those. All my low volumes came from my scrap basket.

My favorite thing about this quilt is the way the instructions are written you decide how many ‘color’ fabrics you use and how much ‘background’ you use, so each quilt will look differently.

The pattern is with my pattern testers now. I have most of their results back, but I’ve got a few more things to do before I release it. It will be this month though. If you are signed up for my newsletter, you will get a half off coupon valid for the release day.

This quilt was made by Katie Linde from Katie Bug Quilts. She has been an amazing tester for me and I just LOVE her Falling Slowly quilt. This also give you an idea of how different each quilt made from this pattern can look. Just for the sake of visuals, here is mine on the design wall.

The blocks uses different size borders on each side, so it give it a slightly off kiltered look, or what I like to call jiggling (remember when I told you I liked a little wonk). Plus, you can rotate the blocks every which a way and really play to the off kiltered effect, which is what I’ve done.