KIS Quilt Along First Steps! Part One!

Okay, so this post is going to get you ready, and hopefully somewhere *near* as excited as I am to start my KIS (Keep It Simple) quilt!

For this quilt, you'll need:

• 9 Fat Quarters
• 40 2.5inxWOF strips 
• 3/4 yd sashing
• 1.5yd to 2yds for wide border
• 1 yard for binding 
• 2.5yd 108in Wideback for backing
• Queen Size batting

I'm building some grace into these measurements for a few screw ups, because, let's face it, they happen. So if you're more experienced, you could get away with .5yd for sashing and about 3/4yd for binding and a yard and a half for the wide border. But I say better safe than sorry, so... you know, measure twice, cut once. That's the goal, at least. 

NOW 

The FUN PART.

I think picking out fabrics for quilts is the MOST fun part of the whole thing! That said, I know not everyone feels that same way, and some people get stuck with indecision. I made this quilt pattern to best utilize large prints in your stash that you don't want to hack into, and would rather leave whole. This works GREAT for designers like Amy Butler and Tula Pink who often use quite large motifs. 

On to COLOR THEORY.

(Take a deep breath. I'm not going to make you learn anything painful today. This is more for the people who are interested in the hows and whys.)
Entire college semesters have been devoted to it, people have written books on it, there's a sea of endless knowledge and theories about it and what works best. Color Theory, folks. Here's a basic idea of how you can play with mixing and matching colors in your quilts and elsewhere, and why you might realize "Oh, this stuff DOES go together!" when you think it wouldn't.

I personally find myself drawn to analogous and triadic schemes the most, but occasionally I'll go all in and do the whole rainbow, too!

Don't let this stress you out. You know why? Scrappy quilts have their own great place too. This is just if you want a more... orchestrated look. I love comparing some of my mom's quilts with mine- she's absolutely the scrappy one of the two of us! My version of "scrappy" still involves sorting through my stash by color! 

If you just want a ready-to-go mix, we've got you covered there too. We've done three analagous schemes based on greens, purples, and red/pinks. Here's some photos of them in all their fun glory:

This is the green/blue bundle, AKA the one I'll be making my quilt with! We've chosen all of these fabrics specifically as focal fabrics, so the large prints and hidden motifs will show up well in large pieces. Just gonna take a second and tell you how massive a fan I am of the wave print on the end- the waves read "A Smooth Sea Never Made A Skilled Sailor" and I just love that on so many levels. And we've got some All Stars, De La Luna, Pinkerville, HomeMade, Chipper, Elizabeth, and Slow and Steady to round out this bundle. 

This is our red/orange/pink bundle, featuring more goodies from All Stars, HomeMade, Zuma, Slow and Steady, Elizabeth, Pinkerville and Eden. Again, I told you guys I'm big on that wave print. The rabbits from Slow and Steady will really shine in this combo given that they're such an exceptionally large print! And who doesn't need some neon jelly fish in their lives?

And finally, to round out our ready-to-go fat quarter starter bundles, our purple bunch! This group includes prints from De La Luna, Slow and Steady, HomeMade, Chipper, Spirit Animal, Eden and Pinkerville for an astounding array of one of Tula's most popular colors, purple! Honestly this was a close second after I picked it out, even though I already knew I was doing the blue/green! (A note about both De La Luna cameos- you'll get two full faces per fat quarter, so they will show up pretty well on this quilt!)

These fat quarters you choose should be your guide to the rest of your fabric- these are the highlighted pieces, so really let them shine, and use the rest of your fabric to accentuate that!

And now onto the other part of fabric picking for this quilt, the accent stripes/jelly race roll segment. You can do this with a premade Jelly Roll of 2.5x42in strips, or, you can do what I'm going to do and make your own! A jelly roll is *just* shy of 3 yards of fabric, so I'm going to choose 6 1/2 yard cuts of blenders and solids to go with my green/blue fabrics and cut those half yard cuts into the needed 2.5in strips. This is another spot that makes this quilt scrap friendly- as long as you have 40 strips of width of fabric at 2.5 inches, you're good to go! We're grabbing a few premade Jelly Rolls of Tula's Solids if you want to throw a rainbow in there for good measure- those should be arriving soon! 

As we're doing this all to appeal to a wide audience, we know some of you just have to dig into your stash, while others will have to add a bit, or a whole lot to get started. We know a lot of quilt stores are having trouble keeping up with orders, so we're going to start the actual "cutting and sewing" part of this on June 15th. Yep, it's a random Monday, but it seemed like it'd provide time for stuff to hopefully ship and people to get situated. BTW... we're doing pretty okay on order times over here. Not to brag or anything ;)

If you're really itching to get going, you can cut your 2.5in strips out if that's a step you need to do, and trim the selvedge off of them, and cut your fat quarters down to 17x20. Fat quarters are *supposed* to be 18x21, but we've found some that weren't quite... hence the need to trim them down for this quilt.