Ice Cream Soda Quilt - Month 2

Another month, another set of eight Ice Cream Soda Quilt blossoms. And I am still absolutely loving this project! And exciting news for those of you who may have missed the sign ups back in February - Jodi has announced that she'll be opening up another round of sign ups in May, so if you're keen to join in on the fun, be sure to follow her over on Instagram. 

I'm finding it really helpful to take pictures of all these blossoms together every so often, to get a grip on what colours I'm lacking and to check that it is going to work overall. I love the fact that it is going to be super scrappy and look really unplanned, even though I'm carefully selecting and fussy cutting all the fabrics for each blossom. I need to concentrate on using more pinks, reds and purples this month, especially in the outer rings, to try to make it a bit more balanced. 

Like last month, I'm still using lots of my favorite designers - Lizzy House, Tula Pink, Heather Ross and Anna Maria Horner are all making frequent appearances.

One of my favorite finds for this project has been Heather Bailey's True Colours collection. I bought a bundle of these from the Fat Quarter Shop (in one of their flash sales, so it was something like 50% off - bargain!), and they are so perfect for fussy cutting. The centre of this blossom (one of my personal favorites) features one of these prints in the centre. I find sometimes geometric prints are difficult to fussy cut, as they aren't always symmetrical. Not a problem with these, and I can see myself using them in lots of my blossoms.

No colour is being ignored for this quilt - I'm even including brown (a totally underrated colour in my opinion!) I am SO in love with these hedgehogs wandering around the edge of this blossom!

I wasn't sure about the centre of this one initially (deliberately cut so that the arrows are offset from each other), but it's really grown on me and I have decided I love it.

I haven't forgotten about my promises of some English Paper Piecing tutorials either - between my middle child turning 10, Easter, school holidays, some secret sewing (plus work and life in general) I just haven't had time. But once school is back I plan to get them sorted!

I have some other exciting news too. I've been practicing like mad quilting pantographs on a long arm at one of my local quilt shops, ready to offer customer quilting. So I'm extremely excited to announce that I'm now available to do edge to edge quilting for customers! I'll share more details about that really soon!!

xx Jess