Starry Skies Sewalong - My Scrappy Version!

My plan for the Starry Skies sewalong (actually my plan for ALL of the Modern Holiday sewalongs) is to use up as much of my stash as possible. Luckily, I had enough in my red, blue, and white fabric bins for the stars and diamonds on the quilt and only had to purchase fabric for the background. Always nice when that happens right?

(For anyone wondering, my background fabric is Essex Homespun Linen in Chambray by Robert Kaufman. You can buy it HERE!)

I really want an Americana/vintage/scrappy vibe for my Starry Skies quilt so I decided to change up the placement of the prints from the pattern and keep all of the points on my stars the same prints. I also decided to mix up my center squares so that each star block is different. In the pattern you make four sets of four different stars (photo of the quilt below), but, in my version, none of my star blocks will be the same. In the end, it'll look like I used a much larger variety of fabrics, but in reality, I'm only using four fat quarters of red prints and four fat quarters of blue prints.

And a photo of my first four blocks! Confession - I might have gotten so excited about making these blocks that I finished all 16 blocks in one day 😂🙈 In my defense, they are SO quick and SO fun to make. Basically, it was impossible to resist 😉 

The sewalong for Starry Skies starts on Monday the 23rd and it's still not too late to join! You can purchase the pattern HERE and sign up for the Starry Skies Weekly Newsletter HERE.

The Sew-Along will be casual and four weeks long. It will be hosted on Instagram using the #starryskiessewalong and #modernholidayquilts hashtags, and you'll receive weekly newsletters sharing what is in store for that week. Be sure to post your weekly photos of your progress using the above hashtags and you'll be put into the prize pool to win free long-arm quilting on your completed top by Kaitlyn of Knot & Thread.

SCHEDULE:
Lindsey's schedule noted in ( ). 

WEEK 1: Choose Fabric, Cut Fabric & Make 4 Star Blocks (or 16 whatever you want to do)

WEEK 2: Make 6 Star Blocks (pretend you made 6 that week)

WEEK 3: Make 6 Star Blocks (again more pretending)

WEEK 4: Make all Diamond Blocks and sew the top together! (Contemplate doing this between weeks 2 and 3, but wait until the very last minute of week four instead)

UPDATE! Here's how my Starry Skies quilt turned out! 

Modern Holiday Quilt Collection - I Heart You Quilt

Today's spotlight is on my Valentine quilt, I Heart You!

First of all, this quilt comes together FAST! You could easily finish this in a day or two. Not to get too cheesy, but originally I was going to name this quilt "Speak Love." The world today can feel so dark and heavy at times that I think spreading love whether through your words or actions is more important than ever before. Because this is technically a Valentine quilt, I went with something a little lighter and named it "I Heart You" instead. The speech bubbles with the hearts also make me think of conversations or cards/texts you might get from a loved one on Valentine's Day. The ones that make you smile real big and feel so loved inside. I wanted to make a quilty-version of that feeling. 

Meghan and I also are doing casual sew-alongs for each quilt for the Modern Holiday Quilt Collection over the next nine months (The first sew-along, Starry Skies, starts 4/23 so get ready!). I am really excited about the I Heart You sew-along in particular (right behind The Ghost Quilt 😍😍😍) Right now, my plan is to do a blue-green floral background with white speech bubbles and coral, pink, and peach hearts...In my head, it's going to look super cute. Hope I can make it just as cute in real life!

Fabric Bubb is selling bundles in the Kona Solids we used for each quilt too! You can find those bundles HERE.

Our tops were all quilted by the super sweet and talented, Kaitlyn from Knot & Thread! We may or may not be giving gift certificates for Kaitlyn's longarm services as prizes during each sew-along too! More info about that coming soon!

We hope you love these quilts as much as we do and have the most fun making them! 💗 We currently have the entire collection and bundle discounted in our shops until midnight tonight! The bundle especially is an awesome deal right now. Three patterns for the price of four! Woot-woot! Take advantage of it while you can!

The Modern Holiday Quilt Collection - Angry Clown Edition

I am so excited to officially introduce the Modern Holiday Quilt Collection on here!! This is a collection that Meghan/Then Came June and I have been working on for awhile and we can't believe it's finally time to show these quilts off! The patterns are available in both my Craftsy and Etsy shops (available in Meghan's shop as well!) and we currently have them discounted until Sunday the 8th! You can purchase the patterns individually or save a little bit and buy them as a bundle instead!

I will be honest, this was mostly the brain-child of my bestest quilty friend, Meghan aka Then Came June, who very graciously asked if I'd like to collaborate with her on it. I was feeling pretty burnt out at the time, but my gut said, "DO IT!" and I'm so glad I listened. It's been a really fun eight months working with Meghan! She's extremely talented in SO many ways, hilarious, and I so admire how driven and business-minded she is. I can be pretty intense when it comes to work-related stuff, but Meghan and I not only agreed on nearly every decision and how to execute them, but she challenged me to push myself a little farther than I normally would. We made a pretty awesome team if I do say so myself 😉

Meghan and I decided we would design four holiday-themed quilts, each of us taking the lead on two of them, and that they would be modern and beginner friendly. I designed the quilts for Christmas and Valentine's Day and Meghan took over for Halloween and Fourth of July. Her Halloween quilt KILLS me. If you haven't checked it out yet, I give you full permission to abandon ship AKA this post and go look at it instead. It is THE CUTEST. But then come back here when you're done because I've got a hilarious tale to share about the making of the Holly Jolly quilt.

Remember when I mentioned how intense I was? Well, this is a great example of what I meant...

So when I chose to do the Christmas quilt I almost immediately knew I wanted to do holly berries. I wanted the berry blocks to look randomly placed on the quilt - like someone had just laid a bunch of holly berries down on a flat surface and they were ready for a Pinterest-worthy photoshoot. I had a vision and I was SO excited about it, but very quickly realized how challenging this idea would be. To make this quilt traditionally pieced and not appliqued or paper pieced in the style that I wanted was going to be really difficult...

I was determined to make it work though and luckily I had Meghan there to bounce a bajillion (wish I was exaggerating) ideas off of. I ended up going through about three different versions of the idea. Each version had 20 different spins on it. I think I text Meghan non-stop for three days straight trying to figure out what to do.

And thus I introduce to you a photo montage of the evolution of the Holly Jolly quilt...

This was the first idea and pretty close to the final design. But I still wasn't 100% happy with it, so I played around with it more and landed on this...

I liked how this idea had more of a Scandinavian vibe, but after making one of the blocks I noticed it sorta reminded me of a face. And specifically a very hostile clown-like face 😠🤡

I did everything I could to make the clown less angry, but I only made it angrier...

So, I think you all know what happened next, we lololol'd A LOT and then, sadly, the clown was killed off #ripberrytheclown

Then, after bouncing a couple more ideas/versions off of Meghan, I basically ended up where I started 😂. Cue the violin music for Meghan, right?

Anyways, the story had a good ending and that's all that really matters 💗 I am really happy with how it looks now (phew!) and can't wait to make a scrappy version of it myself when we do the sew-along for it in September! I think a version with a low volume background and scrappy red and green prints for the berries and leaves would be so, so cute! I'm not the best with scrappy so we'll see if I can actually execute it 🙏

Tomorrow Meghan will be sharing more details about her amazingly cute Ghost quilt that you won't want to miss! And come back here Sunday when I share a much less entertaining blog post about the I Heart You quilt 😉

🤡