Time to CELEBRATE!

A few weeks ago Kathy Doughty sent me this lovely bunch of fabric - a bundle of her new line Celebrate with FreeSpirit.  She asked me to be inspired with it and to blog about the design process and some of the elements we use to give a project the "Sew Kind of Wonderful" look.

 We have been playing with quilt designs that use a curved half square triangle, so I cut a bunch and began laying them out to feel inspired.  Here are a couple fun ideas..... 

Some of the elements we always try to incorporate in our designs include: high contrast between fabric texture and color, use of solids to show off the curved piecing, and to take a less than traditional approach to the overall design....

I then got it in my head I wanted to play around with the traditional quilt block 'card trick'..... here is one version of this traditional block.

I decided to try using our Chic Picnic pattern and the 

'card trick' block to create a slightly different look...... and these are a few of the blocks as I was working up different layouts.

Not only was I playing with the block layout, but also the setting triangles..... One of the fun elements about Celebrate is the great use of color, and to make the colors look more dynamic I used shades of gray as background and the mustard and plum setting triangles.  Kathy's colors are in the secondary and tertiary zones of the color wheel so the mustard and plum colors also worked.

After a few more tweaks here is the fun Picnic Celebration mini quilt......The quilting helped the 

'card trick' design pop and the plain corner pieces also helped to set it off.

Celebrate was loads of fun to work with!  The colors are vibrant, the scale has variety to offer different looks as the prints are cut into different sizes and the fabric has a joyful feel to it!

~Helen~