Heart Quilt Sew Along

Heart Quilt Sew Along

I know, I know that just two posts back on January 8th I said that Maureen Cracknell and I had no plans for a sew along, but, turns out that I was wrong about that (insert laugh/cry emoji)!!!!

You know how it is when you see pretty fabrics and the perfect quilt block—you just have to stop everything and make a quilt with it, right?!?!?! That’s what happened with Maureen and I when we both received happy mail from Art Gallery Fabrics with the new Foresta and Ballerina Fusions. Our boxes both arrived on Saturday and by Sunday we were making plans to host a Heart Quilt Sew Along using Allison Harris’s Heart block pattern. It all happened that fast and so will this sew along as we plan to start and finish our quilts and sew along by Valentine’s Day.

Heart Block Zip Pouch by Maureen Cracknell

Prior to this last weekend, Maureen was stitching zip pouches using Allison Harris’s of Cluck Cluck Sew Heart Block tutorial to make heart blocks that she then turned into Mirrored Hearts zippered pouches for her Etsy shop. She loved making the hearts so much she’d told me she’d love to make a quilt from the hearts next.

Like I said, as soon as the new fabrics came in, now we both wanted to make heart quilts!

Photo by Maureen Cracknell

Allison’s Heart Block tutorial has a free download for her heart block with size options and a quilt layout for a 6’’ square block. You’ll also find suggestions for how to customize this block into other projects.

For this sew along we have Allison’s permission to use her block and we’ve selected and designed a quilt using an 8” square block, sashing, and border layout to make a 52’’ x 61’’ throw-size quilt. You’ll find a free download for our quilt layout, coloring sheet, and fabric requirements on the Sew Along page.

We’ve not included piecing instructions in our free download because the Heart Block tutorial at Cluck Cluck Sew will cover what you’ll need to know about making the heart blocks and next week I’ll go over putting the quilt top together with sashing and borders right here on this blog.

You may want to design a different layout for your heart blocks or follow Allison’s quilt tutorial from her site—Feel free to be creative! This is a casual sew along and a customizable project. The end goal is to have have fun sewing along with your Quilty virtual friends and have a finished project to gift, admire, or snuggle under by Valentine’s Day!

Assorted Art Gallery Fabrics from Mayfair and Foresta Fusion photo courtesy of Maureen Cracknell

You may have seen our fabric pull posts on Instagram as teasers to this sew along?

Maureen will be making her Heart Quilt from a mash up of Amy Sinabaldi’s MayFair and the new Foresta Fusion collection. Fusions are a group of ten prints from various Art Gallery Fabric designers that have been recolored and curated into the new color story. The two collections pair beautifully and have a romanic look for a heart quilt.

Quilt kits for the quilt Maureen will be stitching are available at Lady Belle Fabric.

The Heart Block is a fast block to piece and this quilt is a great way to show off your favorite prints! If you’re planning to make quilts like Maureen and mine, we’ve gone with a 30-block quilt and pulled 10 fat quarters. Background, backing, and binding requirements are listed in our free PDF download for the quilt layout in the illustration above.

Heart Quilt fabric pull by Sharon Holland

I’ll be making my Heart quilt from a curated mix of fabrics from: Art Gallery Fabrics Ballerina Fusion (a recolored mix of AGF designer prints), my Spirited, Everlasting, Signature, and Maureen’s Enchanted Voyage and Mystical Land collections.

My non-traditional Valentine colors remind me of sugared gum drops and candy. I’m crazy over this color palette and went with my heart when I did my fabric pull.

Due to the short notice of our sew along there’s not a quilt kit or bundle that exactly matches my fabric pull. However, Fabric Stork has created two beautiful bundles of ten Art Gallery Prints that would make a gorgeous heart block quilt that has a similar color story. You’ll still need to get your background fabric, backing, and binding.

AGF Bundle from Fabric Stork

AGF Bundle from Fabric Stork

We’ll be posting our progress on Instagram and encourage you to follow along and share your fabric pull and progress as well. When posting your quilt to Instagram use the sew along hashtag of #agfLOVEquilt and be sure to tag @sharonhollanddesigns @maureencracknell and @cluckclucksew so we can see your progress! If you’re sewing with Art Gallery Fabrics don’t forget to tag them too as they love to see what Makers are making with @artgalleryfabrics !

I’ll be adding progress snippets, videos, and tips videos to my Instagram Stories as I work on my quilt. As you can see, I’m pretty far along and have all my 30 blocks made only after two half-day sewing sessions. I’m excited to see it all come together!

I am an Amazon Associate site and earn from qualifying purchases on the products I’ve linked below. The helpful products selected are the same or similar to materials used to make the project(s) in this blog post or related items I think you may enjoy.

Happy New Year - 2019

Happy New Year - 2019

My last post was the end of November 2018 so I need to fill you in on what’s happened between then and now. December went by so fast I didn’t even get a chance to make an appearance on this space-my apologies.

Holly Spring by Sharon Holland

My December revolved around friends and family and I just didn’t bother with keeping up my social spaces during that family time. I had a wonderful Thanksgiving through Christmas and I hope you did as well.

If you follow me on Instagram you saw that I had painted similar sprigs of holly art for sale and then painted larger pieces as gifts. I was very pleased with the response to my art and am very encouraged to continue painting and eventually selling prints and originals in the future. Thanks to everyone who purchased my art!

Holly by Sharon Holland

Right after Christmas and up until writing this post I’ve managed to find extra time to paint. I’ve been exploring acrylics and revisiting watercolors when painting these following pieces.

October Bouquet by Sharon Holland

Daisies by Sharon Holland

Floral Wreath - yellows - Sharon Holland

Floral Wreath - reds - Sharon Holland

Exploring with different mediums and styles is a good way for me to reacquaint myself with painting. The more I create, the more my style as an artist will emerge. I feel I need to make a larger body of work before I decide which paintings to turn into prints and what sort of products to offer (note cards, posters, fabric, original art, etc).

In the world of design there’s a lot of hurry up and waiting going on behind the scenes. It’s not always easy to have things to share because release dates are set way into the future. Very soon spring fabric collections will be revealed and this week I’m putting the finishing touches on a short intro video for my next Art Gallery Fabrics line. The photo above shows my office workspace littered with ideas for a fall collection that I’m currently working on and the photo below is a still shot from my promo video.

Sharon Holland - Designer

Case in point is my quilt featured in Quilts & More magazine. I made this quilt last spring and sent it off to my friends at All People quilt as soon as it was finished. Because a magazine need to work so far in advance, it was not going to show up in print until the Spring 2019 issue—that’s a long time to wait to be able to show you my quilt! Good thing I had plenty to keep me busy with until now because I really hate wating!

Sense of Direction by Sharon Holland. Used with permission from Quilts & More™ magazine. ©2019 Meredith Corporation. All rights reserved.

This fun quilt is made using fabrics from my Signature collection for Art Gallery Fabrics and AGF Pure Elements solids. Great for even a beginner, this full-size quilt is a quick to piece and with it’s simple, diagonal quilting it’s also quick to finish.

Sense of Direction by Sharon Holland. Used with permission from Quilts & More™ magazine. ©2019 Meredith Corporation. All rights reserved.

Sense of Direction by Sharon Holland

Look for the Spring Quilts & More magazine on newsstands beginning January 11th.

Quilts & More Spring 2019. Used with permission from Quilts & More™ magazine. ©2019 Meredith Corporation. All rights reserved.

What a bright and beautiful way to start out the first post of the new year with all these flowers and colorful quilts and projects!

Looking ahead, I know many of you are wondering if Maureen Cracknell and I are planning a new sew along for this year…well, remember that hurry up and wait aspect of designing? After much deliberation we both decided we’ll be skipping this year. Preparing a sew along takes months of advance work which both Maureen and I don’t have at our disposal right now. Speaking for myself I have personal and artistic growth reasons why I need to step away from a sew along this year.

Over the last two years and three sew alongs we’ve prepared you for patchwork success and pushed you to push yourself as an artist. When we start our next sampler (hopefully in early 2020) you’ll be ready to take on bigger challenges right along side us.

You can expect to see new fabric lines from both Maureen and myself, blog tour appearances, and with various “irons in the fire” you won’t be without new inspiration, new sewing projects, and fabrics to add to your stash throughout the year. We hope you’ll continue to stop by our blogs and other social platforms to say “hi” and see what we’re up to.

Cheers to a new year and all it has to offer!

Color Master Designer's Palette Bundles

Color Master Designer’s Palette Bundles

There’s so many reasons why I love designing fabrics for Art Gallery Fabrics and the NEW Color Master Designer’s Palette bundles are another exciting addition to that long list of AGF awesomeness!

You’re probably familiar with the Color Master boxes and bundles by color where prints by the different Art Gallery Fabrics designers are curated to build your stash by color, well…

The new Color Master Designer’s Palette bundles are color palettes curated by designer! It’s like getting a Sharon Holland 10-piece sampler bundle of perfectly coordinating prints from across my different AGF fabric lines all in a pretty bundle or box of fat quarters or half yard pieces of fabric! Both the fat quarter and 1/2 yard bundles contain the same ten beautiful prints.

Learn more about the AGF designers and these new curated bundles HERE on the Art Gallery Fabrics blog.

I was so excited about these Designer’s Palette bundles that I immediately began work designing a free quilt pattern specifically made for use with the ten prints in my Sharon Holland #1 edition. Yes, there’ll be new Designer’s Palette bundle editions in the future!

I’m swooning over the gorgeous color palette AGF has put together with prints from my Signature, Coastline, and Sketchbook fabric collections. This is definitely my color palette!

Feathered Nest Quilt

If you know anything about me and my quilt patterns by now, you know I like to make scrap quilts but I also like to be very efficient with cutting and fabric requirements.

The Feathered Nest quilt is a 58-inch square throw quilt that uses every bit of a Sharon Holland Designer’s Palette #1 fat quarter bundle. See PDF download for full materials list.

With the addition of three Pure Elements solids to the 10-piece fat quarter bundle I’ve come up with easy cutting instructions for a no-fail quilt design. The prints are a beautiful mix of just the right amount of light and dark, large and small scale prints, as well as visual texture. I even used the left-over scraps for a fun, scrappy binding.

This quilt is beginner-friendly, fun, fast, and rewarding to make! You could easily make this over a weekend. Even though this is a throw-size quilt, I love how it looks on top of a double bed.

I used Hobb’s Tuscany Polyester batting for the first time when making this quilt and OMG, I’m in love!!!! I’ve been so impressed with all the Hobb’s battings I’ve tried so far but honestly wasn’t sure I’d like the synthetic batting until I took it out of the wrapper. It’s the most luxurious poly batting I’ve ever handled and quilted like a dream! The high loft was just perfect for this quilt and gives it an eiderdown-look to the quilt—especially as a bed topper like in this photo.

Maybe it’s the recent cold snap that made me want something extra warm and snuggly but I’m thrilled with my choice of batting on this project. The wonderful bonus of Hobb’s Tuscany Polyester batting is that one, it doesn’t shrink and two, it can be quilted up to 4” apart which was exactly perfect for the minimal machine quilting I used when following the diagonal lines of the half-square triangles. Easy peasy and oh, so snuggly!

More and more shops will be adding these bundle/boxes to their listings but at the time of writing this blog post I’ve found the following fabric shops carrying the Sharon Holland Designer’s Palette bundles:

Dinkydoo Fabrics

Threaded Lines

Fat Quarter Shop

Red Thread Studio

Needle and Foot

Download the free Feathered Nest quilt pattern HERE.

If you’re a shop that carries my bundles and would like to use this quilt pattern for a shop sample, please direct your customers to this blog to download a copy of the pattern for use with their Sharon Holland Designer’s Palette fabrics. Additionally, if you’re a shop that carries my bundles and you didn’t see your shop listed above please contact me so I can add you to the Fabrics page on my site.

Happy sewing,

Sharon

My Signature Sampler Week #17

My Signature Sampler Week #17

Here we are, week #17 and reveal finale of the My Signature Sampler sew along! I feel like I have a documentation of this years spring and summer flowers all stitched into a beautiful sampler quilt.

It’s been a joy sewing with my Signature fabrics for Art Gallery Fabrics (AGF) and a treat for me to see so many of you also sewing with my Signature collection or with other fabric collections I’ve designed for AGF. I’ve seen so many amazing new fabric pairings that I’m seriously thinking the next sampler sew along I host will be to make a quilt in prints from across my collections. But, that wouldn’t be until early next year—which will be here before we know it.

Assembly

For this week’s blog post it’s all about assembling the blocks and finishing your quilt. Luckily for me in writing this post, I’ve already covered the tips and tricks for quilt finishing in other sew along post so, if you need extra help with assembling your top, be watching for links to previous tutorials throughout the text in this post.

I've been adding the setting triangles to my finished blocks as I constructed them but many of you may have been waiting to finish all your blocks before deciding on fabric choices and block arrangements, which I completely understand so this post is dedicated to assembly and finishing.

I used a combination of my Perennial print from Printemps Fusions and Untamed Beauty Daybreak from Signature as the background setting of my quilt and stuck to original layout found in the first week handouts.

Working with directional prints in half-square triangle units

The setting triangles are made by cutting a 9-1/2'' square on the diagonal to make two setting triangles. Be mindful of print direction, if applicable. See Community Sampler Week #13 for block setting instructions. 

Here’s a look at my sampler top after stitching all the setting triangles and blocks together. This is the original option without the added Chevron borders added.

If you're interested in adding a Chevron border to your sampler quilt, take a look at the My Signature Sampler week #6 blog post and pick up the border supplement PDF. In the suppliment PDF I also talk about working with directional prints in the borders so please read instructions through thoroughly before beginning.

For my finished sampler I decided to use the top and bottom Chevron border option. This make the quilt a rectangle rather than a square and gives the effect of fringe on the two short ends of the quilt. I love the coral Extempore Celebration floral print addition on the Chevron borders and it plays beautifully to pop the Flamingo Pure Elements solid used in the frames of some of the blocks.

I was height-challenged when clipping my quilt to this fence at the local arboretum but I got the job done and this quilt just begged to be photographed outdoors. I only wish there were more flowers in bloom this time of year in Ohio. Oh well, the quilt makes up for what nature could not provide!

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I'm directing you to the blog post for Finishing that was originally posted during the Sewcial Bee Sampler sew along. You'll find all the tutorial information for spray basting, quilting, and binding your quilt. The sizes have changed but the concept for basting, quilting, and binding your quilt are the same. As stated in that post, there are many ways to finish a quilt and I am blogging about how I finish my quilts. If you have a preferred method, please do it the way you're comfortable with. If you intend to send your top off to be professionally quilted, discuss with your long-arm quilter how they'd like you to prepare your quilt top and backing for being quilted. 

QUILTING

I'm not a professional quilter by any means. I get by and call my quilting style "organic" because it's not perfect and lines are not straight. I love the human touch that non-perfect quilting adds to my quilts.

I used my favorite Hobb’s Tuscany Silk batting inside my quilt and love how light and drapey a quilt this size can be with silk batting inside. Especially for handling and maneuvering a large quilt when quilting on a mid-arm machine.

For a floral quilt like this, I wanted to go floral all the way and chose to do an all-over, organic stylized flower motif. This gives a dense quilting effect of timeless look and feel. I’ve not washed my quilt yet so it’s not even gotten any of that crinkly goodness laundering would add.

The backing on my quilt is from my Signature fabric collection for Art Gallery Fabrics and is called Venture Forward seen here with the last few blooms of summer. I like the addition of this geometric print amongst all the florals and it reminds me of a trellis. For the binding I went with the Lateral Bud Profusion print from this same collection and it frames up the quilt nicely with that incredible teal color.

GIVEAWAY

This week’s our final Friday Giveaway for the My Signature Sampler sew along. This sew along was sponsored by the most amazing companies that generously donated incredible prizes to share with you. I want to give a big thank you to all my sponsors for their part in making this sew along so much fun!

OUR SPONSORS

Art Gallery Fabrics | Hobbs Batting | The Quilter's Planner | Quilters Candy Box | Bloc_Loc | Dritz | Omnigrid | Fat Quarter Shop

THIS WEEK'S GIVEAWAY SPONSOR IS: Quilter’s Candy Box

The Quilter’s Candy Box began in 2016 by Elizabeth Chappell with a wish to surprise and delight quilters with an exciting quilting experience of novelty and boutique notions, patterns, the latest fabrics, and of course, yummy treats all contained in a monthly subscription box. With a motto of, “Satisfy your quilters craving” Quilter’s Candy Box was born.

Quilter’s Candy Box is a curated monthly subscription of quilting treats and a dessert, delivered right to your door. Every box has 5 to 8 items. In each box you’ll be surprised with beautiful fabric, an exciting pattern, and a delicious treat plus quality and unique quilting notions you’re sure to love!

Blog  *  Facebook *  Instagram  * Pinterest

Elizabeth Chappell of Quilter’s Candy Box

When one project ends another one begins! So, for the My Signature Sampler finale giveaway prize, one lucky winner here on the blog will receive the October Quilter’s Candy Box.

Note: This giveaway is only open to U.S. residents, sorry international friends. See giveaway rules for details.

Who doesn’t love a surprise?

The Quilter’s Candy Box contents are kept a secret until subscription boxes land in hundreds of waiting mail boxes (around the middle of each month). Even now I cannot show you what the October box will contain but I can give you a little hint! The October box will include fabrics from Amy Sinibaldi’s beautiful new Sonata collection for Art Gallery Fabrics and sure to be amazing!

Giveaway now closed. Congratulations to Barbara Matzat!

Note: This giveaway is open to US address only for this prize. If you're a "no reply" or anonymous commenter, please remember to include your email address in your comment--you can't win if I can't get a hold of you!

1. Simply leave a comment here under this post! (First comment entry).

2. Follow Quilter’s Candy Box on any of their social media platforms (see links above). Just let me know that you did by making a separate comment here to record that entry. (Separate comment-second entry). 

3. My followers get a third entry! If you follow me via subscribing to my posts, on Pinterest, and/or Instagram, just let me know by making a separate comment here to record that entry. (Separate comment-third entry).

4. Help spread the word!! I know that many of you already do, so I thought it would be nice to add that as another way to enter! Spread the word about the My Signature Sampler sew along on YOUR instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest by pinning any of my pretty images in this post, etc... (separate comment-fourth entry). 

That’s FOUR possible entries—maximum! Enter now through Monday, October 15th! The winner will be picked at random around 4pm Eastern. I will post the name of the winner on this post once they've been notified and responded to my email.

Don't forget to enter into this same giveaway on Instagram by posting images of your sampler inspiration, sampler fabric pull, or blocks. Use the official #mysignaturesampler hashtag every time you post your My Signature Sampler makes (to a public account) and you're automatically entered into the weekly IG drawings as well! See my Instagram giveaway posts @sharonhollanddesigns for full details. 

Happy sewing!

Sharon