Summer Garden BoM: September Fabric Selection

Hello Friends and Welcome Back!

After sharing my planned colour scheme last week, I'm excited to continue working on the quilt along version of my Summer Garden BoM project!

While the original colour scheme was based on the wild flowers found in my backyard during the summer months, the quilt along version was inspired by a different garden. This one will be Garden of Cards themed, inspired by the Queen of Hearts' rose garden from Alice in Wonderland. It will feature green, red, and white blocks, reflecting the red-painted white roses, as well as several black and white blocks, imitating the black and white playing card gardeners.

With the colour scheme selected, this week I'll be pulling fabric from my stash to use for this quilt and making up a shopping list to fill in the fabric I'm missing.

Let's get started!

Print Considerations

Before I can start looking for fabric though, I need to figure out what prints I'd like to use.

For the playing card block variations, I plan to use a solid black and solid white. This choice reflects the solid colouration used on number cards in most of the decks I've used.

For the foliage block variations I want to use a little bit more variety, so I plan to use tone on tone fabrics to reflect the slight colour variations found in nature. However, with the bold, contrasting colours used in this colour scheme, I don't want to use any super detailed or busy prints, so I'll be looking for very subtle tone on tone prints.

And finally, since I used scraps and remnants for the original Summer Garden sample quilt, I've decided to make use of yardage this time.

Fabric Requirements

My next step will be to confirm my fabric requirements.

Being me, I will be making a slight alteration to the pattern size - even though it's my own pattern! I'm planning to make my quilt 6 blocks by 6 blocks, that's 36 total blocks. 8 of those will be card blocks and the remaining 28 will be foliage blocks (that's 4 each of the 7 different blocks).

For the foliage blocks, I'll be able to follow fabric requirements based on the original instructions. For the card blocks, I'll take averages.

In the end, that means I'll need approximately the following:

Solid black - 0.6m

Solid white - 0.6m

Printed red - 0.45m

Printed white - 0.45m

Printed light green - 0.6m

Printed medium green (background) - 2m

Printed dark green - 0.9m

And as another addition, I'm planning to include some narrow sashing between the blocks. I want to put solid white all the way around the card blocks, this will make them appear bigger and give the stark black designs a little extra room to breathe. I'll also need sashing between the foliage blocks to increase them to a corresponding size, I'll be using my printed, medium green background for this.

I'll increase those two fabric quantities to compensate for sashing and get to this:

Solid black - 0.6m

Solid white - 0.8m

Printed red - 0.45m

Printed white - 0.45m

Printed light green - 0.6m

Printed medium green (background) - 2.5m

Printed dark green - 0.9m

With all the details sorted out, I can finally start looking at fabric!

Pulling Fabric

As mentioned last week as part of my colour selection process, one of my goals was to use mostly - or at least partially - fabric that I already own. This not only makes the project cheaper, but also gives purpose to some of the fabric that is currently sitting unused in my studio.

The easiest one is solid black. I commonly use black in many of my projects and I find that it's good to have around since I tend to use quite a bit of it. So already on hand, I have several metres of solid black, more than enough for this project!

Next is white. This is another good fabric to have on hand, but I don't have much of it right now, only about 16" x 23", roughly equivalent to a fat quarter or quarter metre. I'll need to get more of this.

For the printed red I'll be looking not in my own stash, but in my Mother's. Over the past few years, she's made several projects using the Oh Canada fabric line from Northcott. That fabric line includes a few marbled red prints that are really beautiful and would work perfectly for this project! I only a have a few small scraps of this, but Mom has a piece she's agreed to let me use!

Back to my own stash for the white print, I have a 0.5m piece with a pale grey on white print. It has a few inches cut off one end that I used in a few of my Generations blocks, but still has plenty of fabric to use for this!

For the light green print, I have a big piece that I bought while collecting green fabric for the original Summer Garden sample quilt. Since that one was a scrap quilt, I tried my best to avoid using my large cuts of fabric when I could, so this piece should still be big enough!

As for the other two green prints, the medium and the dark greens, I don't have any fabric in a large enough quantity that would work. For both of them, my largest cut would be a single fat quarter. Both of these I will need to buy, so I'll have to see what's available at my quilt store!

With my colour scheming complete, my fabric set aside, and my shopping list prepared, I've nearly wrapped up the first month of the Summer Garden BoM! There's just one final step that I'll be taking care of this weekend with my Mom; a visit to the quilt store!

For all of you who will be quilting this project along with me, I hope you're all just as prepared for the release of the October block as I am! I can't wait to see what fabric you've chosen to work with, feel free to share your fabric selection with me in the comments below or on Instagram @vafibrearts!

In other news, I'm getting really excited for the release of the CQA 2023 Mystery project! The first instructions, hopefully including some fabric requirements, will be released tomorrow. I can't wait!

Until Next Time,

~VA