Celtic Crossing Quilt - Using the "Bookish" Collection
This is a super short and sweet post to share about my "Bookish" Celtic Crossing quilt! Celtic Crossing is my go-to beginner quilt pattern! In fact, it's the pattern that I teach inside Beginner Quilting Academy, my comprehensive beginner quilting course. Psssst! Doors will open up for a limited time once a year and that time is coming up! Mark your calendar for Feb. 3rd, 2022 if you (or someone you know) wants to learn how to quilt! In this 8 week course, I'll take you from knowing absolutely nothing about sewing and quilting to a confident beginner! You can read more about the course here.
...but back to Bookish!
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Ya'll know this by now.... but Sharon Holland is one of my favorite fabric designers from Art Gallery Fabrics. I think I've made a quilt out of all of her recent fabric collections. For this quilt, I just loved the cozy reading vibes that she created. The book pages, reading glasses and argyle patterns really creates the sweetest story and reflects the love of curling up on the couch with a good book in hand! I especially love her florals in this collection along with the use of colors. I mean....these colors are right up my alley! Which is why I wanted to create an ombre quilt. If you haven't seen my blog post about tips for an "ombre quilt" you can find that here.
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I've kind of been boycotting traditional light and neutral backgrounds. Don't get me wrong, I love a good Kona Snow or White background, but I guess you could say that I've been feeling a little adventurous lately. Regardless, I knew that I wanted a neutral background for this quilt, but I decided to make it scrappy.
Since Celtic Crossing can use precut 2.5" strips as the background fabric, it's really easy to split those up and use what you have. If you have a stash full of low-volume prints or solids, I think this would be a great quilt idea for you! For this particular quilt, we used the following:
- (4) AGF Macchiato
- (7) AGF Snow
- (5) Kona Doeskin
- (7) Kona Ivory
- (5) AGF White Linen
Now for the large throw, you only need 22 Background strips, so use more or less based off which colors you want to see more of in your quilt.
You also only need 13 fat quarters for this size, so you can either have 3 fat quarters left over, or use a little bit less of each of the 16 fat quarters in the collection. You can also use 1/4 yards instead of fat quarters.
For the color placement of this quilt, I wanted to really highlight the gradients between all of the colors. We put the more saturated gold/pecan in one corner, which fades into pinks and hot pinks. Moving across the quilt, things feel a little bit cooler as they transition to blues and teals. Overall, the scrappy background gives it a more home-y/ heirloom feel in my opinion. But I can totally understand if you want the cleaner look of a solid background. Here is a mock-up of the Square Throw size with a solid background:
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And here's a mock-up of Bookish using my Nightingale quilt pattern...just for funsies!
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Once the quilt top was pieced, we sent it to Sarah of Stitch Mode Quilts for quilting. I've really been loving Long Arm League's pantograph's lately! I went browsing on her page and feel in love with Leafy Bloom! It's like the perfect modern flower and l love the texture that it adds!
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For my binding, I used leftover scraps from the FQ collection. I loosely placed the binding fabrics where they coordinated within the ombre layout of the quilt. This took a little bit of measuring and planning and lots of trips from the floor to my cutting mat. A solid binding felt a little bit stagnant, so I really like the effect that this has. The backing is called Wildest Dreams from this same collection.
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We had a really big (big for North Carolina) snow storm last week! We got around 10" of the most powdery snow I've ever seen! This also happened to be our first snow as mountain residents, which presented it's own joys and challenges. Needless to say....we were really thrilled to have power throughout the storm so that I could finish up this quilt and write this post! It got a lot of use this last week. It was perfect timing for the finish!
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Can you tell by the look on Peter's face how cold it was?? Haha. We couldn't stay outside too long because it was just SO frigid and windy.
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Since it was so windy, we couldn't get a good full-on shot of the quilt. Luckily, there's a really nice stairwell where our studio space is, which makes a pretty nice back-drop!
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Thanks for reading!
Brittany
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