Week 1: Lil' Lord

Welcome to Week 1 of my first ever sew-a-long! Bear with me as I figure this out and dip my toes into blogging. I'm getting flashbacks to making webpages back in 5th grade. Any other millennials out there remember that? Just me? Cool, cool. 

Anyhow. This is my attempt at running a sew-a-long with a catch - y'all get to make the quilt top with me as I go and give feedback on what you want to see (within reason, team). This week is focused on the Lil' Duke. If you haven't gotten him yet, he's available in my shop for $2. 

For this week, I want to talk a bit about fabric choices. My blocks involve a lot of different fabric pulls, which can make it really tough to decide on a background color. Some of you may have noticed that I tend towards purple a lot for my backgrounds. I think this is largely  because purple isn't a popular color in a lot of collections, which makes it less likely for colors to bleed into it. It also tends to broadcast a variety of colors well, although I've had some issues with pinks if I'm not careful. All of that is to say, I'm normally looking for a background that's going to offer a high (or decently high) contrast to the majority of my fabric pull. 

When you're pulling your fabrics, I'd strongly recommend taking black and white pictures of the fabrics sitting on top of your background fabric. If you can't see the fabrics pop against the background, they're going to blend in. Since we're going block by block, you all have the same obstacle I normally have: you can't pull the fabric all at once. It's rough, right? 

Let's talk about prints vs. solids while we're at it. For this block, I chose a low volume (maybe a mid-volume?) print for the background, and I'll be sticking to solids for the characters themselves. I like to do a mix of the two, although I tend to prefer solids for the characters and a print for the background if it's a choice of the two. Too many prints may take away from the character designs, so be selective in where and how you want to use them. 

If you're brave, you can use directional fabrics. I'm being brave, but I already regret it. The gnomes on my background print are too big for me to disregard print direction, which is normally what I do. If you're going this route, it may not hurt to cut as you go. I label pieces by length x height when I list them in the steps.

I've got a list of what I'll be using attached below for those of you that want to be brave with me. Share your fabric pulls on Instagram or comment to let everyone know what you went with below!