Making Pink Lemonade

The Artquiltmaker is collecting fabrics for her Blue Lemonade quilt, and musing about the design process.  Since she's taking my Pink Lemonade quilt top as a jumping off point, I thought I'd describe my design process for this quilt.

This quilt is part of a series I call "My Scrap Bag Runneth Over" - which is nothing more than a realistic description of what's going on my studio at any given moment in time. 

I like multi-fabric quilts, the more fabrics the better, and despite the fact that my yardage collection has long since reached the point of SABLE (Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy), I am happiest when I am figuring out ways to put existing small bits of fabric together to make bigger pieces of fabric. 

That being said, I don't do random.  At all.  Ever.  I just don't have enough faith that the universe is going to make things go together in a way that is harmonious, or at least pleasing to the eye.  That idea of putting patches in a brown paper bag and pulling them out and stitching them together as they come out of the bag?  Gives me hives just to contemplate it.

For Pink Lemonade, I was using pink, orange, and yellow and I had two design rules.  I wanted to make sure that a) I spread the colors/prints around fairly evenly, and b) that I didn't end up with the same fabrics right next to each other.  So I laid fabrics out in 6 x 4 sets of patches, figuring that if I got a good distribution of prints within each 24-patch unit, I'd manage to get a good distribution overall.

I started with a box of squares that had been cut/accumulated over a couple of years.  There weren't a lot of duplicates in there, which helped.  Once that box was well into being used up, I started cutting squares out of other scraps, and eventually from fat quarters and yardage, though I didn't have to do much of that. (This is where it helps to be a constant accumulator of scraps -- lots of fabrics to choose from.  Not for nothing do I scavenge scraps from friends...) I made sure not to cut more than a few of each print, again to make sure that the same fabrics didn't end up next to each other.  I mixed in the newly cut squares with those left from the original box so that the newer prints wouldn't all be concentrated in the same sections.

I knew before I started what fabric I was going to use for the sashing and border, so I was also working to try and make sure that I didn't put anything too pale on the outside of the units, since I didn't want to have the edges drop out because of lack of contrast between the foreground and the background.  I didn't always achieve that, but I managed enough that I was happy with the design in the end.

Bottom line: My quilts are always designed, even if they look like I spilled a box of squares on the floor and just grabbed them up as they fell.  I'm pretty happy with how this one came out.  It's actually been quilted now, but not bound yet.  I'm sleeping under it occasionally, though, even unbound.  My house, my rules!