Thursday, June 26, 2008

Quilt Patterns from Exclusivley Quilters Fabrics

Over the past few months I've had the privilege of working with Exclusively Quilters Fabric Company, designing quilt patterns for several of their fabric lines. Below is a slideshow of the patterns I've designed and some of the accompanying fabrics. If you'd like to see more of their fabrics, pay a visit to their website. There you'll also find links to shops that carry their fabrics. You'll also get a peek at some of their upcoming lines. Of course if you want any of the patterns, you can get them from my website nancyrinkdesigns.com. I also have kits for Forever Lovely and will soon have kits for Akimbo.

Their fall lines are currently "in the works'--I can't wait to see them and begin the process of figuring out what I'm doing with them. My plan is to share some of my design process and construction steps with you here on my blog.

Meanwhile, I have a quilt I'm making with some great Westminster fabric that'll I'm going to share with you, too.

Patterns from Exclusively Quilters Fabrics

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Working on the New Block of the Month Quilt

Designing, making, and writing the directions for a block-of-the-month sampler quilt always seems to have me frazzled. I want each BOM quilt to have a theme, so that's the first task. The theme of the new quilt is "Building Blocks", which, coincidentally, is the name of the quilt. When I selected the theme of building blocks, what I had in mind was all of the building toys I played with as a kid. I wanted each block to be named after a different building toy, so I sat down and began brainstorming the names of toys.

Legos, Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, erector sets . . . . . Uh, wait . . . that's only four. The quilt has twelve blocks.

And so I began some online research into different types of building toys. I certainly found a lot of very interesting toys. Some of them I had seen and my own children had played with, but I certainly didn't know the official name of the toy. Other toys I had never seen before but was intrigued by them. One such toy is Kapla, a French toy made from marine pine.

It just goes to show you. Quilt projects can take you to some unusual places. I got to revisit my childhood and some really cool websites with really cool toys!

Oh, and by the way. Yes the quilt is done and will debut July 2008 on my website, nancyrinkdesigns.com.