Heirloom Quilt

by rosedeniz

My diversion of the day has been to play around with fabric swatches in order to piece together the remainder of an unfinished quilt handed down to me by my grandmother. The squares were made by my grandfather’s mother. This is what one quilt block looks like:

Originally I was thinking to use variations of yellow and brown to bring out the flowers and french knots, but now that I have pleated seafoam green curtains (long story), I really want to tie in the quilt with the curtains to make the color scheme more livable. Not to mention the curtains are a bit frilly, so the pattern needs to be brocade or more elaborate than I had originally planned. How to tie in a vintage quilt with shiny curtains? That’s my goal. Ideas?

Yesterday I fell in love with Heather Bailey’s fabric, so I made a test layout in Photoshop (pretty haphazardly, I should add), to see if it might work.

These are the fabrics from her website that I love:

And one possible layout… this is pretty rough, however. I kind of gave up after awhile trying to tile them. I think once I had the fabric, I would rearrange the squares more, and make less uniform lines.


I know I should do a starter quilt, not having done one before, but I’m not very motivated to try a difficult pattern — any suggestions? I have lots of fabric scraps that could be used for a for a patchwork quilt.

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