Week 1 - Fabric Pull
Welcome to week 1 of the Bar Code Quilt Along!
I'm so excited to have you here and to get to sew along with you!
This week is all about picking fabrics, and introductions over on Instagram.
Colour options
Have you had a chance to browse through the mockups and tester quilts to get some inspiration?
The Bar Code pattern has the instructions written out for a version with 6 bar colours plus a background, a two-colour option where all the bars are the same colour, and a scrappy version. Of course, anything in between goes, too, but you'll have to make adjustments to the fabric requirements and cutting instructions. If you find yourself stuck somewhere and just can't figure it out, feel free to email me and I'll try to help.
I hope you were able to download the colouring sheet and extra fabric requirements from your welcome email, too. If not, you can download the pdf here.
This is my fabric pull for the cover quilt. It's Kona solids in Robin Egg, Lagoon, Celestial, Grellow, Valentine and Bubble Gum. The background fabric was Kona White.
Some tips on choosing fabrics
I only have a couple of tips because Bar Code is such a versatile quilt that you can pretty much do anything you like with it in terms of picking colours. Grab your crayons and colouring sheet and let your creativity shine!
First tip, though, keep in mind that if you're using yardage of any kind (versions A or B, or the long strips for version C, I'm using the word yardage a bit loosely here) the pattern always makes two blocks per 21" strip set. So if you're planning anything other than strictly following the colour options in the pattern (ombre for example, or using more than six colours for version A) you'll always get two blocks that will be the exact same. So plan that in when you use your colouring sheet.
The only time this is not the case is if you're using the scrappy version where you cut 9" strips. That truly is scrappy.
The second tip is to choose your background wisely. And by that I mean you will need a fabric that has a 42" usable width. You can get away with less for the 2.5" and 2" strips, because they'll form the center of each block and you will have some leftover there. But the 1.5" strips that make up the sides of the blocks (see steps 5 and 6 in the pattern) will use up the full 42". You can do it with narrower fabric, but if your background fabric is not a full 42", you'll only get a block and a half's worth of side strips out of one WOF strip instead of 2 blocks', so you'll have to get some extra fabric there. For the throw size, that's an extra 9" x WOF.
My fabric pull
I'm going scrappy for my QAL quilt. I loved how the tester quilt by Mercedes turned out and I have so many scraps I've been trying to incorporate into projects this year.
I was planning on going completely scrappy and just pull whatever I had in a big enough size out of the bin and work with it. But then I was looking at the fabrics I had and noticed I was leaning a bit too much towards blues (blue is my favourite colour so I have a ton of blue scraps) and started to pull more other colours to make sure I had a bit of everything.
And then one thing led to another and before I knew it I had arranged them all in rainbow order... so now I'm going to try to make a scrappy rainbow quilt. I'm not sure yet if it's going to work out exactly how I picture it, but that's the plan anyway.
My background will be white. I love the idea of using a dark background for the rainbow, but I don't have enough dark fabric handy to do it, so white it is. Although I had to order another bolt of Kona white because I'm going to be short a few strips. Fingers crossed it gets here before we get to cutting.
A two-colour baby quilt
I've also been working away on a two-colour baby quilt the last couple of weeks, so I'll be throwing some pictures of that one in here and there, too.
Let's get started!
Head over to Instagram and post your fabric pull, tell us a bit about the fabrics, what size of quilt you're making, and introduce yourself, too! And don't forget to tag the post with #BarCodeQAL so we can all find each others' posts and I can draw a name for the first weekly prize.