March Fabric Focus

 

Sweet Tweet by Mitzi Powers for Benartex P651/09

 

Last month we featured Timsbury Lane and spoke about Spring being just around the corner, this week we have just a month until Easter and we have great projects and fabrics for the season! The fabrics we are Just Hatched from Quilting Treasures, and Baby Talk  and Sweet Tweet by Benartex.

 

 

All of these fabrics are in bright fun colours such as yellows, purples, greens and blues. As you would expect the Just Hatched collection consists of Easter eggs, fluffy chicks and a few Easter bunnies for good measure. Baby Talk carries on the yellow chick theme but with a baby pink background. Sweet Tweet adds some Spring time birds to our Easter collection, the blue and yellow birds are decorated with intricate floral patterns to create a bold design.

Baby Talk 2481 by Benartex

So what projects can we suggest for Easter? As always there are loads of options. We think a wall hanging would be great fun to decorate a Child’s bedroom. For the dining room you could make a fun Easter table runner, try this table runner pattern that allows you to incorporate lots of different fabrics and colours. For the Easter egg hunt, you could make our simple Shopper bag pattern in the Just Hatched fabrics that can be used to collect all the Easter eggs.

 

All of these projects are easy to do but if you need some help or you have something a bit more challenging in mind then you can join Chris Hinchliff and Kate Frankland for their Quilt Escape class on Tuesday.

May Fabric Focus

Over the past few weeks we have focused on some adorable animal prints, but we feel it is time for a change so today we are showcasing the ‘A New Leaf’ collection from Mitzi Powers for Benartex. It has a beautiful watercolour style with some strong prints to make it stand out from the crowd.

A New Leaf is a particularly big range with six fabrics in total. The cream backed fabric stands out in the collection with its watercolour floral print in oranges. It works beautifully with the two darker fabrics in the range; a multi-coloured pebble pattern on a navy blue background and a batik style floral print on a sea blue background. Finally the collection is tied together with three bold fabrics with repeating patterns. Two with retro swirls, one red and one green, and a light green fabric with a circular floral pattern.

Overall, an eye catching collection that will create some stunning projects. Because you have seven different fabrics to work with, a sampler quilt would be a great project. They’s be perfect for Bev Mayo’s Crazy Circles workshop in November too!

As always, patchwork projects aren’t limited to quilts. We think the ‘A New Leaf’ collection would look great as a bag. Our Spiced bag pattern has recently been made up in the ‘A New Leaf’ fabrics, but you could also try our Henrietta Hobo Bag pattern if you wanted a more unique style.

 

February Fabric Focus

It may be cold outside but Spring will soon be on its way and the Daisy Garden collection is perfect for any project at this time of year. It’s bold floral print compliments the soft blues, yellows and greens, giving the fabrics a country cottage theme. The daisies sit alongside butterflies but have subtle hints of geometric patterns both in the panel and the rest of the fabrics.

There is so much you can do with a collection like this; at the moment Jon is working on a table runner using the panel. Sticking with the dining theme, you could cut out the individual squares and rectangles for place mats and coasters, perfect for dressing up the garden table for outdoor lunches in the warmer months.

If you are fairly new to patchwork and quilting, panels are a great place to start; cutting out individual pieces of the panel allows you to try out your new skills on a small and simple projects. Want to try something a bit bigger? You could keep the panel in one piece and turn it into a small quilt by adding borders. But if you are feeling really ambitious you could cut out and rearrange the individual pieces of the panel to make a much larger quilt or a table runner just like Jon!

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