Perfectly Perched {Snowball Blocks}
Are these prints fantastic or what?! I seriously can’t stop staring at them.
My lovely friend Laurie Wisbrun is the brilliant designer of this fabric eye-candy and was sweet enough to send me some to play with. The collection is called “Perfectly Perched” (for Robert Kaufman Fabrics) and will be in quilt shops in July. This will be her 4th line of fabric coming out this year so far. Wow! She is an expert at cranking out beautiful fabric designs and has even written a book about it. Unbelievable!
These Perfectly Perched prints were almost too cute to cut up! I decided to keep the quilt design simple with a snowball block design to really showcase the fabric. For the quilting, I had a lot of fun making lots and lots of random squiggly lines using my freemotion quilting technique.
For those of you who don’t know what a snowball block is or how to make one, let me take a second to explain! It is so easy and fun.
You basically need a bunch of colorful 5″ squares and lots of neutral 2″ squares. To be more specific, I used eight colorful fat quarters and cut twelve 5″ squares from each. From the white fabric, I cut another thirty-six 5″ squares; from the gray, I cut five hundred and twenty-eight 2″ squares. Yup, five hundred and twenty-eight of them. It sounds much worse than it is.
Once the cutting is done, you’re ready to assemble your snowballs. Here are the 4 easy steps:
1. For each snowball block, you will need one 5″ square and four 2″ squares. Mark the back of each 2″ block with a diagonal line. Place one marked square in each corner of the 5″ block, right sides together, aligning raw edges. Pin in place.
2. Sew along the marked lines; trim away the excess fabric.
3. Press open the seams with an iron.
4. Admire your lovely snowball block and move on to the next one!
Once you make all of your snowball blocks, you assemble the quilt like you would any basic block quilt. Pretty cool, eh?
Big thanks to Laurie for sharing some of your gorgeous fabric! To see the other amazing designs she is working on, head over to her blog and stay a while. No, seriously. You might find yourself pinning the heck out of her blog for the next forty minutes.