Spirited – beautiful new collection by Sharon Holland and AGF

Hi everyone,

Now that food feast and fun with family and friends are settling down, let’s talk fabric again… beautiful, new fabric!! Sharon Holland did it again – Spirited is just so amazing!!

Colors are so rich and beautiful, florals with such amazing detail and – horses!! Horses got my heart instantly!!

You will find soooooo many amazing projects and ideas for this beautiful collection as always, in ever-inspiring AGF Spirited Lookbook – definitely check it out!!

Here, I will show you some of my designs and makes.

I imagined and doodled so many designs with these beautiful fabrics!!

Maybe on another post I will show you all of those too with some thoughts on how and why they came up to be? Is anyone ever interested in reading things like that? I know I love reading about design process and inspirations behind it, but that might just be me… let me know!

Two that came to life in fabrics are the last two – table runner and placemats and this quilt above, that I call Blooming Prairie.

Stars!! I love love love Star blocks!!

I also love to make a “quarter-star” blocks so that I can manipulate and play with final layout and create some secondary patterns too.

This would be a what I call a Quarter-star block: ( a quarter from the one above)

Oh, of course my sewing supervisor was there to approve them… 

That is essentially what this quilt is made of – one center star block in the middle and whole bunch of quarter-stars around it.

Final border is really just the extension of the background with one large Flying Geese block in the center of each side. Can you see now my whole layout? Simple blocks that make this seemingly complicated design! That is just how I like it… haha!

In terms of piecing, all this pattern required is making some Half-square triangles, and cutting some squares and triangles – that is it!

While I promise to finish a complete, downloadable PDF pattern for this quilt and table runner, VERY SOON, here are some simple diagrams to show you how this quilt is created:

1. These below are the quarter-star block units you would need for the quilt:

And this is how they are constructed:

Each Quarter -star block unit is 8″ finished (or 8 1/2″ un-finished) and if you make 12 of one color combo and 12 of another, plus 4 large, corner, HSTs (they are also 8″ finished),  and add some plain fabric squares (8 1/2″ cut), you can complete the layout: (plain fabric squares are not pictured in the layout below)

For the final border of this quilt, I made 4 large Flying Geese units (they are 8″x16″ finished!) and placed them in the center, and finished with strips of the same FG background fabric. You can see FG blocks here:

(Largest Flying Geese I ever made!!)

This quilt finishes to be 64″ x 64″ square and it makes a lovely lap size, or back-of-the-couch type of quilt, maybe even a large wall quilt (if you would have a large enough wall!

For quilting, I chose several, beautiful colors of 50wt Aurifil thread :

and went with lots of organic, free-motion doodling! Here are some quilting details…

Of course, one of the most fun things to do when you make a quilt is to take it to the photo-shoot! Below are just a few photos I took – promise to share some more very soon – and of course – CHECK OUT THE AGF LOOKBOOK!!)

And catch some behind the scenes fun shots (thanks to the best husband, aka quilt holder, ever!!)

See you all back here soon!!

Marija