Just 2 Charm Pack Quilts Blog Hop: String lights

If you've followed, or even just checked in occasionally with my blog over the years, there is a good chance you've seen one of Cheryl Brickey's (Meadow Mist Designs) mystery quilt along projects in progress. It's one of the projects I look forward to each year.  So when Cheryl asked if anyone was willing to make a quilt from her new book Just 2 Charm Pack Quilts, I really wanted to participate. 

 

The first decision was choosing which quilt to make.  There are some really fun quilts in this book.  I'm not the quickest at sewing together a quilt top, so I decided to choose String Lights because it didn't look like it required quite as much piecing as some of my other favorites.  That decided, it was time to pick the fabrics.  I'm not a precut collector, so I didn't have much in the way of charm packs to choose from. So decided to make my own charm pack.  Of course that pretty much opens up the entire fabric collection as fair game, which can be a bit overwhelming. Then I remembered this Timeless Treasures Tonga batiks kit I purchased back in 2013.   

I loved the fabrics, but not so much the pattern.  The smallest pieces are only about an 1/8 of a yard. That's hard to incorporate into a quilt pattern, so it sat because I wasn't sure what to do with it.

 

It made a nice set of 5" squares.  But the number of fabrics in the kit was just a bit short of what I needed to follow Cheryl's advice on how many squares to cut from each fabric to ensure you've got good variety in the quilt.  The kit also included a panel.  

It was excluded from my original set of charms. I thought it might go on the back.  The medallions are about 7" square, so a charm wouldn't capture all of the design.  Then I decided that the centers looked just fine as charms anyway, so those got added to the pile and allowed me to extend the range of fabrics.  Fabric A, the consistent fabric in the quilt, was still missing from my fabric pull. The black in the panel would be a good fabric A.  Thankfully with some careful cutting, those pieces cut be cut from the same panel. So I didn't waste much of the panel.  For the background I used a pale teal batik.  That did require a trip to the quilt shop.  

I made one change from the directions in the book.  The quilt requires hour glass blocks. Rather than using 2 HSTs place face to face, then sewn and making 2 hourglass blocks, I cut all of my HSTs in half and then matched them up because I wanted more control over the placement of the fabrics. 

I'm pretty happy with my version of String Lights, even though it's not quilted yet (remember I said my piecing is really slow, I did good to get the top done). 

Here's a close up that shows the fabrics better.  

It was a fun quilt to make. The instructions are well written and easy to follow.  I'm looking forward to making some of the other quilts in the book once I get my UFO pile tamed a bit. 

If you made it this far, the reward is a giveaway of an digital copy of Cheryl's Just Two Charm Pack Quilts.  I worked from the digital copy to make this quilt.  The digital copy works just fine.  Just leave a comment below. If you don't know what to write, share which quilt you'd make from the book. If you are a follower of Life in Pieces, leave a second comment with  how you follow this blog (email, Feedly, Bloglovin, etc.  Since it's a digital download, the give away is open to those who don't live in the states.  I will choose a winner next Tuesday by random number generator.   

You can check out the rest of the blog hop over on the Just Two Charm Packs page at Meadow Mist Designs.