Monday is all about fabric - #50 - Shopping your own stash + a new Dresden quilt

Yes, third week in a row I haven’t bought any fabric. Sorry friends! This past week I’ve been working on another custom Dresden quilt and I shopped my own stash. Well, mostly.

Go make your tea (or coffee), and let’s start gushing over fabrics!

Support a small shop

Visit Needle in a Fabric Stash here. I know I’ve featured this shop several times, but seriously, they have quite a great stock of AGF fabrics and I think you’ve figured out by now I’m kinda partial to them. Also, how adorable is their shop in this pic (above)!

To be fair, I didn’t completely shop my stash for this quilt. I did buy these four prints to get me started (on top). They are based on some of the colors wanted by my quilt buyer. From there, I just added fabrics I thought would compliment them.

The four prints are:

To be able to shop your stash, it’s important to have a well rounded stash. I talk a bit about that here.

I’ve mentioned several times that I keep my fabrics sorted by color. This really helps me to dig through my stash in the exact places I need to be. I pulled a lot of low volumes, some oranges, blues, green and reds.

Now that I’ve had time to make all my Dresden plates, I’m a little bummed I didn’t use more low volumes there. The background is going to be low volume, so in my head I must have been thinking all the plates should pop.

Don’t get me wrong, I do love what I’ve started, but do you remember this quilt? It’s one of my most favorite quilts I’ve made and the background and the Dresdens both held lots of low volume. Still, I feel I’m off to a good start with this one. I always start doubting myself in the middle of a project, do you do that too?

They are pretty saturated for the most part, which will really make that pop I mentioned.

Later today, I’ll be stitching them down onto the backgrounds.

If you look on my IG page highlights, I added a highlight with me running through making Dresden plates, chain piecing style and how I organize that a bit. I’m also working on a page for my site just about Dresden making. It will kind of gather all the info scattered in multiple places on my site and group it altogether. It will be geared toward if you have never made a Dresden or you are wanting to learn better techniques. Hoping to have it finished up early next week and then I’ll add to it as I post new info.

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Back to shopping stashes…..

It really feels good to do. I don’t particularly like buying fabric for a quilt, but I’d rather buy fabric that draws me and then find a quilt to use it in, the downside is I have a heftier stash doing it this way (is that a downside?). I’m more into creating a color palette and then picking the fabric or finding a fabric and then looking for fabrics that go with that fabric.

I’ve been talking with several other quilt maker’s that say they have a hard time mixing their fabrics out of a fabric collection or making scrappy looking quilts. When I make a scrappy quilt, I rarely don’t start with something like a color palette. Just because it’s scrappy doesn’t mean that any fabric goes. I like to think of it as controlled scrappy.

For example in this quilt, I used all blue scraps. It’s still scrappy, just controlled.

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After that….

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I’m hoping this quilt will be finished up this weekend. Fingers crossed!

Tell me what you think about scrappy quilts. Do you like them? Do you have tips on mixing fabrics? When you buy fabrics, are you buying what you love or shopping for a specific quilt?