Are you ready for a summer sew-along? My lovely friend Andrea - from the Willow Cottage Quilt Company - and I will be making a Spellbound Sampler quilt this summer. We'll be sharing our progress on Instagram and we'd love you to join us.
If you’re already on Instagram you can find Andrea here and me here. And if you’re not, have you thought about joining? I’ve been posting on Instagram for seven years now (crikey) and actually joined to take part in a sew-along: you can read about my early adventures here. There is a really lovely quilting community waiting to inspire you, share their knowledge with you and generally cheer you along.
Andrea and I will be marking our posts with the hashtag #spellboundsewalong and if that looks like gobbledygook, let me explain. Hashtags are used like little index cards to organise the squillions of photographs posted every day on Instagram. They are entirely optional, but typing one in the comments section below your photo will add it to a library of posts on the same theme. For example, type in #quilt on the search page and you will find over a million posts by quilters of every age from all over the world. And if you’re making one of my patterns, post with the #cakestandquilts hashtag and I’ll do my best pop over to say thank you :-)
We have a delightfully relaxed schedule for our sew-along and starting on Friday, June 1st plan to make a block a week for the next nine weeks:-
June
01 Gothic Gatehouse
08 Pumpkin
15 Moon & Star
22 Toadstools
29 Mervielle du Jour
July
06 Moonlit Bat
13 Raven
20 Wise Owl
27 Cobweb
I'll be posting hints and tips every Friday, so it will be easy for you to get in touch and ask questions. I will also post here on the blog the following Monday - fingers crossed - so that those of you who aren't on Instagram can still join in. Finally, on August 3rd, we will start joining our blocks and constructing our borders.
{photo posted by Corey on Instagram}
In the meantime I'm going to start choosing fabric, a.k.a. fabric procrastination. My last Spellbound Sampler was made with Corey Yoder's beautiful 'Sundrops' fabric and, ever helpful, Corey has released another gorgeous collection called 'Pepper & Flax' which combines warm greys and buttery yellows with moss green. One of my lovely readers - hello Kristal *waves* - came up with the brilliant idea of a colouring sheet and you can download a Spellbound Sampler Colouring Sheet here and start procrastinating...I mean...planning.
This is my first attempt, which sticks to Corey's limited palette. I was considering adding some of the soft corals from 'Sundrops' so that it looked more like my original quilt, but on second thoughts...
Nicola xx