hello,

In case you don’t know me I am Susan Ache of Yardgrl60 on Instagram. I love making scrappy quilts by day and cross-stitching by night.

I have done several quilt books and Aurifil floss sets and patterns. My latest endeavor is to partner with It’s Sew Emma and co-author CELEBRATE WITH QUILTS along with Lissa Alexander.

So one to why I am the guest blogger today…..

It is so very exciting to know that our very first Quilt Along with Celebrate with Quilts is starting.  4 days of fun!!

When Lissa and I would talk about the reasons behind our love of quilting, one of them was the fact that we loved to make quilt blocks.  Well, “blueprint” is designed for just that reason.  It's just perfect on its own if you just want to pop in your favorite fat quarters or take it the extra mile and create your own sampler using the quilt blocks in 4 different sizes offered from the book.

I  had such a wonderful time at the International Quilt Market in Houston this year, talking about all things “Celebrate with Quilts”. And, Lissa and I talked about what fabrics we wanted to play with for our very first QAL from the book and then I was so very fortunate to meet Cathe Holden and besides fangirling almost to the point of embarrassment, I thought that her newest fabric coming out “curated in color” would be such a cool and fun look for “blueprint”.

So, let's set that stage.  “Curated In Color” is a super bright rainbow mix of collages and fun fabric icons, and I knew that I wanted to blend in some things from my stash.  I searched first for all things that were solid-ish, and what I mean by that, it was a tone on tone, prints that were barely visible within the colors or just wovens.  Anything that was a real print was excluded because the fabric I chose to use speaks for itself and just needed pops of color to break up the prints.

I just started cutting the largest blocks first.  I really needed to get those up on my design wall so that I could move the colors around that pleased my eye. DAY 1 assignment is to cut all your fabrics. The big blocks are easy and you can crank those out in no time, but I wanted to go ahead and share my design wall in progress to help explainmy process.

Cutting and placing some of the shapes from the other blocks helped me make some decisions. Remember this is something really different for me. If you do not have a design wall, that is okay. Make each days block assignments and then layout and reaarance entire blocks instead of bit and pieces.

Check back tomorrow evening for a few more steps on my design wall and see what Lissa is working on. Also be sure and follow Moda fabrics on Instgram and Facebook. @modafabrics.

Lissa and I will be sharing some short videos and conversations about the process.