Picking my Fabrics for the Jen Kingwell Long Time Gone Sew Along

We're starting March 15 -- it will be here before you know it! And in a few months, it will be over!  So, there I was in my studio, picking fabric for my Jen Kingwell Sew Along quilt, and gravitating toward orange and purple -- I've been in my orange and purple period for years! I love those colors together! Among many other quilts, I've made an orange and purple Spinning Star quilt...

 

And a Bear's Paw quilt that we call Scrappy Bear's Path. It doesn't sing orange and purple as loudly as Spinning Stars, but, as the saying goes, it's all in the family!

For big quilts, I usually add green into the mix. It's a stabilizing, calming color in the orange-and-purple party! Here's a photo of the fabrics I pulled to get started. Don't these look great together?

Then I decided to search my fabric collection and go for a little lighter and softer palette than my usual orange, purple, green palette. I had a pretty good group when I hit my personal theme fabric jackpot! It's got all the colors in it that were already in my sew along fabrics! I love shopping in my fabric stash!

The colors in this novelty Hoffman print really pulled everything together. Oh, my gosh, I wonder what year I bought that fabric! I have absolutely no memory of buying this, but it is my standard 3/4 yard purchase and it is in my studio, so obviously I did buy it -- I'm glad I did, it's perfect with this group!

The ladies reminded me of one of my favorite Kaffe Fassett "shirt stripes" that I've been hoarding, and a Holly Holderman hydrangea print, and the two of them made me think of a favorite green basic dot that I have from one of my own fabric lines.

Then, when I thought I was all set for the Long Time Gone Sew Along, I was searching for something else and found this perfect Moda Layer Cake called "Saturday Morning" by Basic Grey. In a quilt made with 1-inch squares and 1/2-inch strips, a 10-inch square of fabric will go a long way!

 

Now I really was all set to start sewing! 

That's a lot of different fabric, but there is a method to my madness. I call it "Anticipation Cutting" -- I love using lots of different fabrics in a quilt, and I loved getting all these fabrics out for this project. What I don't love is cutting what I think I need for right now, putting the fabrics away, sewing, getting them out again, cutting some more, sewing, etc. As we go along, I'm going to share some neat tips for anticipating what you're going to need to cut soon and killing two blocks -- or more! -- with one rotary cutting session.  😊

Read More About It

That's how I "shopped at home" for my fabrics. Angie and Nicole wrote about picking fabrics on their blogs, too, sharing links for curated fabric bundles and offering a discount code on Allison Glass fabrics. Use these links to read their articles:

http://gnomeangel.com

http://www.snipssnippets.ca

Long Time Gone by Jen Kingwell. Copyright 2016 by Jen Kingwell Designs. Available on the From Marti Michell website, www.frommarti.com