A Summer Quilting Tale Sew along Let’s begin!

Book Shelf Quilt

Ready to start a Summer Quilting Adventure?

This week you can start your quilt prep and a little bit of sewing. Do you want to paper piece some blocks for the shelves? Check out the this post for the PDF patterns of the teacup and the plants. Here is a checklist of decisions that you will want to make before you start cutting any strips.

How big do I want to make this?

Is this going to have several personalization’s? You may want to think about scale/size of your personalization.

If you are more organic and want to think about adding personalizations that’s ok but having any hand stitching on your books may be easier at this phase.

You may want to keep this as a minimalist quilt and that makes a fantastic quilt!

The First Cuts!

I started with choosing strip sizes for the majority of my books. 1 3/4, 2, 2 1/2, 3 inches. I didn’t like the look of wider books and certainly smaller books may work for you. I also started to cut the background fabric in the same widths. Then I sewed a book strip to a background strip. I made sure that these strips were 12 to 14 inches when joined together. BIG TIP: vary the length of your books so that you can adjust them as we go when the next step begins July 29th video with Halo Inspirations. If you want to wait until July 29th to see all the tips and tricks plus construction that is ok, too. Some people may want to slowly start their project because they are confident in this step.

Start putting your strips on the design wall and play around with how you would like the colors to be arranged. Wild fabrics may need to be next to a calmer fabric ,brights against something less bold… whatever looks good to your eye and preferences . Look for balance in color. Start thinking about where you may want items placed on your shelves .

I also suggest making a few strips more than you think you may need because you can have choices and swap some things out as needed.

At this point, you can add little insertion strips on larger books. I like to cut strips that are about 3/4 to 1 inch wide by the width of the book and in high contrast to the book color. I randomly pick where I want to place this little embellishment like about 2 inches from the top and bottom, in the middle, or three . Just cut a straight line across the book where you want the inserted little strip and sew the little strip on each new side of this cut on the strip. Sounds more complicated than it is , sorry! See pic

DO NOT START to assemble any books together long enough for a shelf yet because there are more details, personalization and construction information yet to come!