Rachel’s Vintage Purple Prom Dress (Vogue 2001)

May 16, 2024May 16, 2024Leave a comment

When Rachel picked the Vogue 2001 pattern for her prom dress, I was elated! I love me a vintage pattern, and thankfully, so does she. I wasn’t sure she’d actually go through with the idea when push came to shove, so I was incredibly pleased that she was committed to some vintage glamour for her first prom.

Pattern

Vogue #2001, only released from the archives this spring. It’s a reprint of a 1941 pattern, and the first time she pointed it out to me I squinted at it because it really looked like a 1930s top smashed up with a 1950s skirt. I actually said, “That top and that skirt don’t go together, what is going on here?!” And then I saw the 1941 publication date and immediately thought about World War 2 fabric rationing and how this pattern did not fit into that idea whatsoever. But then my husband and I figured out that Pearl Harbor happened in December 1941, so American patterns were not adopting a “war rationing” mindset until 1942, probably. I wonder how many women purchased the pattern with the intent to make it and then couldn’t make it because of rationing?

Fabric

Rachel picked out a lavender satin taffeta and a lilac organza from JoAnn Fabric. We needed 11 yards of both because the main eater of yardage in this pattern is the skirt, which is ginormous AND cut double. The pattern doesn’t have instructions for two layers of skirt, but it’s what we wanted to do, so I overcast the waistline of them together and then treated it as one skirt.

Notions

Thread: Good ol’ Coats & Clark Dual Duty All Purpose #3440. I bought two out of caution, even though I never use the second spool, but I did actually need the second spool on this dress.
Zipper: The last lilac-colored invisible zipper in my weird assortment of cast-offs that I ordered from Amazon years ago.
Horsehair Braid: The solid main fabric skirt has a 3-inch horsehair braid in its hem. The circumference of each skirt is 528 inches, so I used almost fifteen yards of horsehair braid. The pattern called for 4-inch horsehair braid, but I had purchased the 3-inch braid years ago on Amazon for a “just in case” moment, and decided to go with that.

Time Spent

I DID actually keep track of how much time I worked on this! I wasn’t able to get to working on this dress until a week before the dance, so I made the decision to “live update” my progress to my friends on Facebook—at the end of every hour of working on the dress I’d snap a picture and type out what I’d accomplished as a comment to that day’s Facebook post about the dress construction. I knew that the public accountability would help me stay focused and have a shot at sewing this up in a week. Little did I know, my Facebook friends started cheering me on and leaving me uplifting comments as well, which really buoyed my spirits as I toiled away in my craft room. I will absolutely use this method of social pressure to help me finish big projects in the future!

Muslin: I wasn’t tracking hours while working on the muslin, so I estimate it took about five hours.
Sewing: 39 hours, according to my Facebook posts.
Total: ~44 hours

Highlights

The fact that Rachel picked out a vintage pattern just made me so happy!
The Facebook live updates and the cheering from friends made this so much more enjoyable to construct.
I did French seams on as much of this as I could and the seams are just so beautiful inside this dress.
I was able to do that whole dart rotation maneuver and transfer some annoying fullness in the upper arm and shoulder area into the bust gathers. I did a new thing and it totally worked!
The narrow hemming of the sheer layer is, by far, the best job I’ve ever done on narrow hemming. I enjoyed that step.
I did cheater gathering with a length of yarn for each quadrant of skirt and it worked beautifully. Highly recommended.

Lowlights

The side seams of the skirts are too short, despite having measured the skirt on her to the ground, so her petticoat showed a little bit. No idea how this happened. Very annoyed.
Kimono sleeves are stupid. That is all.
Holy skirts, Batman! Cutting out the skirt sections was a logistical concern. No matter where I went in my house there wasn’t enough room to lay it out in one run so I had to shift the fabric and pattern for each skirt to continue marking it. That brought some challenges, but I got through it.
I bought a hooped petticoat to go underneath this and even had Rachel try it all on with the hooped petticoat, but she hated how it felt to have the skirts held away from her legs and refused to wear it. Which was too bad because I think the skirt was more impressive with the hooped petticoat beneath it. She ended up going with a tulle petticoat and a flounced petticoat over the tulle to smooth things out.

I really love this dress and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to make it for my girl. We bought a book that showed how to do 1940s makeup and hair so she could go with the complete 1940s vibe. She did her makeup beautifully, and I am not known for my hairstyling skills so the hair was a little less than hoped for, but whatever, it worked…enough.

Renaissance informed me that Rachel’s dress was a star of the show the entire night. Girls were coming up to her over and over again to exclaim how much they loved her dress and how it was like a fairytale princess gown and how much they wished they had one like it. Now that I know how much work goes into constructing those precious princess ballgown skirts, I get why they’re not offered in your typical off-the-rack dance dresses. Whew! I’m glad she got to feel special at the dress in her dress! Who knows, the trauma may wear off just enough by next year for me to consider making another one for her…

Links to all posts about Rachel’s Vintage Purple Prom Dress

Renaissance’s Celestial Purple Prom Dress (McCall’s 7091)

May 14, 2024Leave a comment

Alright, as promised, a debriefing on Renaissance’s prom dress:

Pattern

McCall’s #7091, discontinued but available online as a PDF file.

Caution: It’s a batch of three downloads with up to sixty pages in each download that you have to tape together. An A0 printing option is NOT available. It took me four hours to tape the one hundred and twenty-seven pages together.

Materials

Dupioni Silk in colorway “Comet Tail” (5 yards), Shantung Silk in colorway “Nolana” (4 yards), and Batiste Silk/Cotton in colorway “Apparition” (2 yards). All three were purchased from Silk Baron.

Working with silk is a lovely experience. I opted to do all of my cutting of the fabrics with a pinked rotary blade in order to cut down on fraying, and that was an excellent choice.

I will not use the Batiste Silk/Cotton as a lining in the future because it has too loose of a weave and stretched and grew like crazy inside the dress, causing the neckline to sag more and more as Renaissance wore it. It’s a beautiful fabric and I want to make more things from it in the future, but it’s not well-suited to give structure to a garment.

Notions

Thread: Aurifil 50 weight #2780 when piecing “Comet Tail,” Superior Threads’ Pima 50 weight #8035 when piecing “Nolana,” and I used Coats & Clark Dual Duty XP All Purpose #3510 for piecing the “Apparition” gray lining. Ren used an invisible monofilament thread (that she hasn’t put back so I can’t tell you for certain who makes it) for securing the rhinestone appliques.
Zipper: I used a light purple invisible zipper from my zipper drawer, still leftover from the ill-advised purchase of the “scrap bag” of invisible zippers that really only included colors that I’ll rarely ever use. I used blue Sharpie on the zipper pull to camouflage it against the Comet Tail silk.
Rhinestones: We bought two rhinestone appliques “Devine Pair Applique LA-11” from Planet Rhinestone on Etsy, and a loose pack of various sizes of rhinestones from Amazon.

I originally planned to use silk thread for sewing this all up, but read online that it was a bad idea and that silk thread should really only be used for embroidery and the like. So I went with cotton.

Renaissance spent all of her free time in the week leading up Church Prom attaching the appliques, and Emily, Ren, and I spent a frenzied two hours on the day of Church Prom gluing the loose gems to the dress with Beacon Gem-Tac adhesive and toothpicks.

Time Spent

Assembling the pattern: 4 hours
Sewing the dress: My memory is fuzzy on this, but I feel like it was five weeks’ worth of sewing a few hours a day. My estimate is forty hours of work? All those princess seams took a long time to assemble, and I handstitched the contrast skirt’s hem.
Rhinestone application: Renaissance estimates that it took at least ten hours to sew the two appliques onto the dress. It was her first time doing something like that. And then three of us worked for two hours together to glue the loose rhinestones on, so 3 x 2 = 6 hours.
Total: ~60 hours of work

Highlights

First time working with silk and it was awesome! I ended up phoning Silk Baron to get advice on whether or not to wash the fabric before sewing and whoever answered the phone was incredibly friendly and took their time in explaining the situations where it would be ok and why this was not one of those situations because the dye and the shot weave would lose their coolness factors.
There is only one pucker in all of those princess seams! I really learned how to ease fabric with this dress. I’m a fabric-easing machine now. The trick is to cut the notches before you pin.
The lighter purple contrast skirt was assembled using French seams, which was the first time I’d done them and they turned out great.
Watching Renaissance work on sewing the rhinestone appliques to her dress while watching “The Simpsons.”
Working with Emily & Renaissance to glue the gemstones onto the dress. I always like family group projects.

Lowlights

Taping the pattern together. Seriously, McCall’s, you need to offer an A0 printing option. A lot of sewing happens on a deadline and having to spend four hours upfront taping paper together is brutal.
Owing to my background as a quilter, I default to a shorter stitch length when I’m nervous about a seam. It turns out that this is not the correct default when sewing clothing. My choice to go with a shorter stitch length on the two skirt hemlines resulted in bunchy edge finishes, which no one really noticed except myself. The swoopy hem could have laid down so much nicer if I’d realized that. I did redo the hem on the lowest part of the swoop because it had to be trimmed, but didn’t have time to do the upper portion.
I also wonder if I should have used a thin horsehair braid on the swoopy hem in order to make it stand out more? When the silk was fresh the swoop skirt stood out in beautiful rounded columns, but by the time it was finished it had gotten limp and didn’t do that anymore.
The lining grew a lot and the neckline sagged more and more as she wore it.

Lowlights aside, I am monstrously pleased with this dress! It had twenty-nine separate pieces to assemble because it was a twelve panel princess seam dress, and I made it work! It was beautiful plain and it was beautiful with the rhinestone embellishments. It makes a beautiful swishing noise when she’s moving in it. It’s just a beautiful dress and she loved it and I’d totally do it all over again.

Note: She is wearing a crinoline with the dress to help the skirt stand out more. I think it was this one. Or it could have been this one. I bought both and each girl wore one of them and I can’t remember who had which one.

Links to all posts about Renaissance’s Prom Dress

Church Spring Formal 2024

May 12, 2024May 13, 20241 Comment

I did manage to finish Rachel’s dress in time—11:30 that morning, to be exact—and Renaissance was able to finish adding bling to her dress—at 3:00pm that day, after a two hour gem-gluing session with Emily, herself and me—so all the dress dreams became a reality for the Church Spring Formal. I threw their hair into some updos, fretted over shoes and petticoats, and we were on our way! Their dates looked great, and I think everyone had a good time. We had dinner at my granny and aunt’s house because it was near the dance and we knew that Granny would love to see the dresses. It was a nice evening.

And now, I think I’m going to take a little break from my sewing machine…it’s been a wild two months of non-stop sewing! I’m so pleased with how they turned out and so glad that my girls liked them. Happy memories.

Prom Dress Crunch Time 2.0

May 10, 20241 Comment

I am so sorry that I have not been updating for the past two weeks, but I had to get going on Rachel’s prom dress for the church spring formal, which is taking place this weekend. It has been NON-STOP SEWING around here, often taking 8-10 hours a day of focused construction on this beast of a dress! I have had no time for anything else—the girls have been making dinners and I am running low on clean clothes, my friends! But it’s coming together, it is GORGEOUS and we are getting close to being done. I’ll be back next week with spring formal pictures and, hopefully, detailed posts about both the Celestial Purple Prom Dress (which friends named the “Swoopy Mermaid Dress”) AND the Vintage Purple Prom Dress (which I have named the “Lilac Behemoth” because the skirt on this thing, guys…wow.

I am currently in the midst of flipping the horsehair braid under the skirt and sewing it down, and then all I have left to worry about is the side zipper. I was hoping I could add some embellishments to the bodice, but I think I’m going to run out of time on that aspiration. There’s going to be A LOT of sewing happening in the next twenty-four hours! I was so jazzed when Rachel picked out Vogue 2001 because, FINALLY, a vintage dress pattern! What I failed to recognize was the sheer mass of skirt this thing has and how much time would be needed to just cut the skirts out. Well, that, and the fact that I threw a sheer overskirt into the mix as well…there’s twenty-two yards of fabric in those skirts combined. The skirt circumference on this thing is 528 inches. Big skirt. Super big skirt. Insanity of the highest degree. And then multiply that by two. Go big or go home. See you in a few days with spring formal pics!

Prom 2024

April 28, 20243 Comments

The big day has come and gone and Renaissance’s dress was finished the evening before and Rachel’s backup dress actually fit. Success! Oh, they looked beautiful. My baby girls went and got all grown up.

They had a great time at prom, and it was wonderful watching them be excited for and enjoying the evening. My heart is full.

I’ll post details on Renaissance’s dress in the next few days.

On the Eve of Prom

April 26, 2024April 26, 20241 Comment

Hello dear ones, and welcome to the last day before prom and all of its craziness in the world of dressmaking! I feel like I have hardly left the craft room all week long, logging an average of eight hours per day working on Renaissance’s dress. (Keep in mind that from 2:30pm onwards, I generally have no say over how my day goes because it’s all chauffeuring and music lessons and dinner prep and cleanup.) I have had some very long days this week!

Top priorities this past week:

Finishing Renaissance’s prom dress
Starting Rachel’s church prom dress, if possible

Creativity

The weather has cooperated with me this week and was mostly rainy and gray, which makes me feel entirely NOT guilty for staying inside and sewing all day, ha ha ha. I got the skirt attached correctly to Renaissance’s dress and went about my merry way with attaching the lining to the bodice, sewing in the sleeves (which, if I may say, I did an excellent job on the sleeves!), and then hemming the skirts.

Marking the hem of this dress was a memory I’ll keep, and not for any particularly memorable reason. It was just nice to spend that time with Renaissance, amidst the flurry of a busy day, where she got to put on her dress for the first time and we were able to ooh and aah over it and let the excitement build. If you’re looking to strengthen the upper half of your posterior muscle chain, I highly recommend marking hems on skirts. I’m sure there’s an easier way to do it, but I had to lay on my stomach and keep my head and shoulders lifted for thirty minutes while I measured and marked the entirety of the hem. I was sore the next day!

I am hoping I can get in and redo the top skirt’s hem because it’s looking “homemade” in a bad way. After scrutinizing it I decided to change my approach on the bottom skirt’s hem and sew it by hand and I think it’s looking much better. It just takes forever. I’ve got about 12-14 inches left to hem, which will take 30-45 minutes. I still need to trim the top skirt because it’s dragging on the one side, so I’ll do that by hand tonight and then I’ll unpick and re-hem by hand portions of the top skirt until I either finish it or run out of time.

Thank goodness I found a backup dress for Rachel. I have had no time whatsoever to even begin working on her dress.

Gardening

In brief moments of time away from the prom dress, I cleaned out my countertop garden. It had reached 100 days of growing and most of the plants had died off, but the three basil plants were still going strong. It was the first time I’ve cleaned it out and discovered that you definitely want to remove any spent pods when they die because if you don’t, the roots will start rotting and molding underwater, which made for a lot of unpleasantness.

I harvested the last of my basil plants and made pesto for a soup I made during the week. Unfortunately, the basil plants had passed the point of maturity and the pesto ended up tasting exceptionally “green.” It’s such a delicate dance of allowing the basil leaves to get large enough, but not so large that their flavor starts to mimic lawn grass.

Caring

Nathaniel had his first home cross country meet this week, and it works out that it starts right after Renaissance’s oboe lesson ends, and her oboe lesson is at his school, so she just walked on over and we cheered him on. I’m so proud of him. Last summer he realized it would be easier to be healthy if he became a runner, so he decided to join track and cross country. He’s literally in it just for the exercise.

Well, I wish you a happy Friday and ensuing weekend and look forward to sharing prom photos with you next week. (I need to remember to charge my camera’s batteries!) Cross your fingers that I can finish up Ren’s dress to a “good homemade” level!

Prom Dress Crunch Time

April 22, 20241 Comment

The high school prom will be THIS Saturday! I think I’ll be good to finish Renaissance’s dress. I made an atrocious error on it on Saturday, so I’ve spent this morning seam ripping the entire skirt so I could re-attach it correctly. I am normally really good about going through a pattern’s instructions beforehand and highlighting any weird steps so I don’t make mistakes during construction, but I managed to miss reading a very important moment when I was supposed to sew the right side of the skirt to the wrong side of the lining, and ended up sewing right sides together which resulted in the skirt being sewn on inside-out. Joy of joys. I’ve atoned for my mistake and unpicked the two rows of sewing AND the row of hand basting, and then did them all over again. Yep, winning.

Note to self: For future sewing, look for any steps that deviate from the default “right sides together” and highlight the heck out of them.

Another prom-related development happened on Friday: A mom in Ren’s friend group texted the group chat and asked where everyone wanted to eat dinner for prom, we weighed in, and she texted us back saying that a reservation for four had been successfully made. I had been under the impression that the one friend wasn’t going to go to the high school prom, so I turned to Rachel and asked her if she knew who he was going to prom with and she said, “Me.”

My mouth dropped, my shoulders caved, my eyes widened, “What?!?”

Rachel, upon seeing the change in my posture, got a deer-in-the-headlights look on her face, “I forgot to tell you, didn’t I? He asked yesterday and we bought the tickets today.”

I spent the next two hours working on Ren’s dress and mulling over the logistics of finishing that dress AND Rachel’s dress in a week, and ultimately decided to send out an SOS to friends to see if anyone had a dress that Rachel could borrow for the high school prom because I highly doubt I can pull off finishing both dresses in time. A few people responded, for which I am so, so grateful!

A back-up dress has been secured, it is less modest than I normally would consider, but at the end of the day no one will die and the world will continue to turn. Rachel is thrilled because she’s always wanted to wear a dress with this neckline but has had the good sense to not push for something like it, so everyone is relatively happy.

So this week will be all about finishing up Ren’s dress and getting a head start on Rachel’s dress for the church formal. I’ll post if I have time, but don’t surprised if I don’t.

Gathering Steam

April 20, 2024April 21, 2024Leave a comment

Welcome to the end of my first week back after the Big Spring Sickness of 2024! Whew, it was a nasty bug—I’ve heard that multiple people in our area required medical intervention due to it. Ugh, so much exhaustion experienced by all. All in all, though, it was a good week full of good weather and a lot of productivity.

Top priorities this past week:

Prom Dressses
Garden tasks
Driver’s licenses tasks

Creativity

Ren’s Prom Dress: I was still quite weak at the beginning of the week, so progress on Ren’s prom dress didn’t happen until Wednesday, but I put in about four hours of work and all of the basic elements of the dress (Bodice, lining, underskirt) are assembled in their basic forms and I can now move forward with attaching them to each other and doing finishing work. The end is in sight!

Rachel’s Prom Dress: I’ve not made any progress on this, which is extremely unfortunate because I was supposed to begin working on it in earnest this week. We’ll get there when we get there.

Garden

I actually used some of the rhubarb this week, which was good because it’s starting to become a behemoth of a plant! We had a lovely rhubarb/mixed fruit crumble for dessert one night. Soooo good.

I got caught up on starting seeds and direct sowing seeds! Renaissance helped me plant four different varieties of marigolds in one starting tray, and I planted sweet peppers, hot peppers, pepperoncini peppers, Big Daddy tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, zucchini, crookneck squash, broccoli, and cilantro in the other tray. I still have a few spots open for some more seeds in the second tray, which I might use for some herbs.

I transplanted my started pansies and delphiniums into the garden, but they’ve been struggling for weeks in their trays and I do not know what to expect from them in the future.

I direct sowed the last bit of peas, and some Bells of Ireland and Four O’ Clocks. I also went back and fortified the trellises with better staples to hold them to the ground for the peas and sweet peas.

Caring

Driver’s Licenses: Renaissance is officially a licensed driver! WOO HOO! We finally did it! I took her to the DOL on Tuesday and she’s got the paper! We are waiting for our insurance company to get back to us on adding her to our policy, and once we have that confirmation she’ll be good to go. She can’t park on campus until she has proof of insurance, so we’re waiting on that task as well. Michael is also replacing the brakes on the kids’ car this weekend so they can be extra safe.

Rachel has been studying every afternoon for her Driver’s Knowledge test this weekend. It’s a good thing I made a note to make sure she was doing this—every afternoon has found her completely forgetful of the task AND I had to intervene at one point because she was playing video games while listening to a YouTube video about driving rules and considered it as studying. Uh, no. I’ve not been her favorite person this week because I keep insisting on nitty gritty studying tactics. You’ll thank me when you pass the test, girlie.

Emily hasn’t done any practice driving because I’ve been too busy with getting caught up with life this week, but I’ve scheduled daily drives for the next six weeks to get her back up to snuff.

Regarding the bridal shower and wedding gifts, I think I’ll just return them to Amazon and then re-order them and have them delivered to the couple’s new address. I still need to text the mom and get that figured out.

Renaissance and I sat down to talk about her post-high school plans and run the numbers. She qualified for every merit and music scholarship available at the colleges, but we are just middle-class enough to not warrant any financial assistance via the FAFSA, so she was going to be on the line for $17,000-30,000 per year to attend the four-year universities she was thinking about attending. That is simply not feasible for her, so she’s going to go with her alternate plan of attending technical college and earning an associate degree in culinary & pastry arts so that she can have a marketable skill that can then help her finance her future plans. She was really torn between studying music or studying pastry, so either option was fine with her. The pastry program is good in that she can then transfer to a four-year school and earn some sort of business and/or food science degree, if she desires. I think she wants to eventually open a bakery of her own, and that she wants to work with local high school students and the community to offer educational opportunities and/or internships in culinary areas.

I’m disappointed that the money couldn’t work out for a four-year option. I entered the financials into a copy of the spreadsheet that I had made when we did this for Emily two years ago, and I was appalled to find out that one of the schools they both applied to increased their tuition by $17,000 in just two years! It’s bonkers out there, and it led to some very serious conversations with Emily this week in order to adjust her expectations for the future as well. You just can’t expect an 18-22 year old and their family to cough out or sign up for loans in the amount of $120,000 for a college education at a Division 3 school! That’s almost the cost of our first house! Gross. The technical school option will end up costing just $8,000 a year, which is a sum we can work with. And HELLO…a pastry chef in the family? That’s just cool. Ren was also wise and applied to start in January so she can spend a few more months working to save up money to pay for it all. If you know of any bakeries hiring, she’s looking!

It was a really busy week, with a lot of important things happening, and I think it’s turned out well. Hopefully this weekend sees a lot of time for sewing, weeding, and driving practice!

Layer Cake Latte Quilt Fabric Choices, or “Why I Chose the Fabrics that I Chose”

April 18, 2024April 16, 20241 Comment

I had fun picking out the fabric for this quilt because there were A LOT of great collections that have come out in the past little while. So many that I actually got a little overwhelmed with my options and decided to poll my Facebook friends on what collection they would choose:

I was really surprised that the winner of the poll was #5: “Antoinette,” by French General for Moda, followed by a tie for second, with only one vote less, of #3 “Honey & Lavender,” by Deb Strain for Moda, and #6 “Lemon Bouquet,” by Timeless Treasures Fabrics.

I had already been leaning towards #1 “French Quarter,” by Maywood Studios because I’ve been slowly morphing my home’s decor towards a blue and white palette, but it really surprised me how few votes the collection got in comparison to the other collections. I love two color quilts and I assumed everyone else did as well. The only other collection to get less votes was #2 with all the reds. Two color quilts are not a favorite amongst the people I know.

So I decided to just mock them all up in the quilt pattern so that people could understand why I was going to go with French Quarter despite it not winning the poll—namely, because the contrast was going to be excellent. I thanked everyone for voting and promised them that I’d show them what each collection looked like once the quilt pattern was released, and so here we are. I present to you, dear friends, what the Layer Cake Latte quilt could have looked like in the different collection options:

#1: French Quarter, from Maywood Studios

#2: Heirloom Red, by My Mind’s Eye from Riley Blake Designs

#3: “Honey & Lavender,” by Deb Strain for Moda Fabrics

#4: “Honeybloom,” by 3 Sisters for Moda Fabrics
I mocked this up with two different background colors because I really liked the blue in the collection.

#5: “Antoinette,” by French General for Moda Fabrics

#6: “Lemon Bouquet,” Timeless Treasures Fabrics
I mocked it up with two background colors because I saw the Kona Color of the Year, Mint Julep, and thought it might work well.

I like my quilts to have a fair amount of contrast between the background fabrics and the showcased fabrics, so French Quarter was my ultimate choice, but I did think long and hard about going with Honey & Lavender because I really liked the look of that one as well. I don’t decorate with a lot of purple in my house, so I went with the blue.

But there you go, friends, the visuals that helped me choose my colors. Seeing them mocked up, which fabric collection would you have gone with?

Layer Cake Latte Quilt, a new pattern from Fat Quarter Shop

April 16, 2024April 15, 20242 Comments

It’s the day, it’s the day! Time to show you the Layer Cake Latte quilt in all its mostly-finished glory.

Details:

Pattern: Layer Cake Latte Quilt, a FREE pattern by Fat Quarter Shop.

Fabric: A layer cake of “French Quarter,” by Maywood Studios, and a layer cake of White Bella Solids (98), plus a little extra yardage of the solid for the border.

Thread: Piecing: 50 weight Aurifil, Natural White #2021

This is another pattern in Fat Quarter Shop’s “Shortcut Quilt” series, which starts with some sort of precut and creates a quilt from there. I especially like these kinds of patterns because I really working with precuts.

The pattern uses two layer cakes–one of prints, one solid—and I ran into the problem of my whites not matching up well. French Quarter’s white is more of an ivory/muslin/natural white, and stock was low of those whites in solid layer cakes when I was ordering my fabric, so I just went with a regular pure white and told myself it would be an experiment to find out if it really does matter as much as I think it does to match your whites perfectly. Result of experiment: Totally fine. I don’t mind the “mismatch” at all, and actually like that it makes it easier to see the difference between the two colors.

If you love half-square triangles, this pattern is full of them. If you can tap into a meditative flow state whilst trimming HSTs, prepare for some blissful sewing.