Quilt Along – Learn to Quilt – Lesson 3

As I mentioned in my last post, Tracey @ It’s a T-Sweets Day is running a learn to quilt series as a Quilt Along and I’ve been following along, trying to make my first quilt. I found some beautiful fabric at Quilty Pleasures, a local quilting shop. If you live in the Ottawa area and are interested in quilting, I recommend checking them out. They have a fantastic fabric selection, and the ladies there are very friendly and helpful.

I’m trying not to fall too far behind in the lessons, because 1) I’m super excited about this project, and 2) I’m worried that if I don’t try to keep up fairly closely with the lessons, then I’ll lose interest and start some other project.

If you’ve checked out Tracy’s lessons, you know that she did her quilt in red, blue, and white. For my quilt the pink is taking the place of the blue in the original design, and the teal is taking the place of the red. At the beginning of this lesson I had these stacks of 1 1/2 x 6 1/2 strips. There are a lot of them, and it was a bit intimidating thinking about putting them all together.

At the end of the first pass I had this long garland of fabric strips joined together. It took me the whole evening to sew them together, and the next night I pressed them and was ready to start on the next set of joins. They looked so nice all pressed and ready to go!

For this step I had to add another pink strip to the other side of the teal. Once again I had a gigantic garland piling up behind my machine as I sewed.  You may notice that I have a lot of the dark pink, I decided that rather than do an equal quantity of each of the pink fabrics, I wanted to have more of the dark pink that the other pink fabrics. We’ll soon see how that decision worked out!

After sewing all those pieces it was back to the ironing board! Don’t these pieces look lovely, all pressed and ready for lesson 4? These colours really do make me happy!

If you’re interested in making this quilt (even if you don’t want to do it as a quilt along), check out the start of Tracy’s lessons here! I’m so excited to move on to lesson 4!

If you’re a quilter, where do you find your patterns? Do you buy your fabrics locally, or online? Do you have a favourite pattern?