Pattern Testing; Bluebird Song

Kris from Phoebe Moon Quilt Designs had asked for a couple of testers to check out her new pattern “Bluebird Song”. I have done a few of her QAL’s and patterns so I knew it would be fun. Here’s the link to her patterns.

All I can say is “you need to make this quilt!” To make it easier, Connecting Threads has kitted this quilt and this is the link.

I printed the pattern and read through all of the instructions, grabbed my scrap bin and easily finished the test block.

This year I determined that pattern testing should be done with the fabrics I have in my stash. A few years ago I had been gifted some bright pretty fabrics from a Moda collection (I think) but I don’t know the name. This pattern just told me I needed bright, happy fabric in order to work my way through some things I had going on in my life (besides politics and Covid).

Can you believe I didn’t take a photo of the fabrics before I started?

Once I had my head together I planned and cut my fabrics, needing to be very careful because I only had so much of these fabrics and I knew I would not be able to get more.

This pattern does use 5” squares so I pulled out all of the charm squares in my scrap user system (unused pizza boxes) that would coordinate with these fabrics.

I started piecing and found the pattern to be well written and the instructions were well illustrated and easy to follow.

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The blocks work out to be 17 1/2” square when squared up. It makes a wonderful quilt with only 20 blocks.

I took the blocks to my Guild to check my layout. This was laid out first using only one table so I had to put 2 together!

I sewed the blocks together and then started auditioning fabrics for the border. I had just enough of the cream background for the background blocks and had made a mistake when cutting my sashing fabrics so I knew I would need to pull more fabrics in to my palette.

Once I decided what I wanted to do with this quilt top, (sorry Kris, I had to change it) I decided to not add the borders. I am adding a backing to it (no batting), will do some stitch in the ditch to stabilize it, and then assembled it to make a duvet cover with a zipper opening. Where we live we are often subjected to long power outages in the winter so I keep a down duvet on my bed. I’m so happy that next winter I will have a quilt on my bed that I made.

Thanks for stopping by to read my post about another fun testing project. 😉Carol