Thanks for joining us in the Home Lovin QAL! If you haven’t already gone over the other posts, start with Plan your Project and Pick your Fabrics before continuing here. Step 4: Cutting Your Fabrics Now we’re getting to the nitty gritty stuff! This step is my favorite step to knock out all at once! If you’ve sufficiently planned your project and picked out your fabrics, this step is QUICK and when you cut out all your fabrics at once, it speeds up the rest of the paper piecing process 100 fold! I have lots of tips and tricks to help you along! What you need: cutting mat and rotary cutter fabrics – and know WHERE they are going cutting templates – print out from the pattern and cut out exactly around the outer border. (The cutting templates are the KEY to accuracy and speeding up the piecing process!! Be brave and give them a try!) When you’ve cut out all the cutting templates, organize them by fabric. For example, I gather all my sky cutting templates together (and ground, if they are going to be the same fabric) and match them up with the fabric I’m using for those sections. Repeat this for each fabric you’re using (so the cutting templates that match that fabric are all together). For my quilt, I’ll have all the house cutting templates with my 25 rainbow prints, the sky and ground templates with my kona haze, the background templates* with my white fabric.

Thanks for joining us in the Home Lovin QAL! We already covered planning your project and getting a good idea of what it will look like in this post here. If you missed it, be sure to go back and read through it before you move on to picking fabrics! Once you’ve gone through those steps, let’s start with one of my favorite, and sometimes most frustrating, steps… Step 3: Choose Your Fabric For this step we’re going to work closely with the colored coloring page(s) that we made in Step 2. I didn’t talk about this in the last post, but when you’re coloring in your coloring pages, it’s really important to pay attention to value – lightness and darkness of a color.  Value placement is super essential in creating the design you want. There really isn’t a wrong or a right in value placement, because each design requires a different scenario. My suggestion to make sure your project turns out how you want, is to look at your coloring pages! Especially the black and white one. Turn your block into a greyscale version and you’ll see exactly where your light values need to be and where your darker values need to be. Keep this handy as we continue to pick fabrics. Matching lighter value fabrics with your lighter value sections, and dark with dark, medium with medium. If you’re having a hard time knowing what value your fabric is, you can take a black and white photo of

Hey y’all! How’s it going?! Are you ready to get started with your Home Lovin project?? My plan for my blog posts are to help walk you through each step of the creative process. There will be a lot of things that may seem obvious, or things that you think aren’t that important and tend to skip over them or rush through. But everything I’ll share is important and when done step-by-step will help ensure that you absolutely LOVE your finished results! The CREATIVE PROCESS isn’t just about finishing something, it’s about connecting to your creativity in every step along the way. Yes, that means that we also focus on the steps that are our least favorite… but doing things that are uncomfortable make us better and stronger. And trust me… there are so many steps in designing patterns, creating a business, making quilts, that I don’t love, but doing them over and over again year after year has definitely made me better than I was when I started, and the things I’ve learned along the way are things that help me more than I could have realized. Does this all sound hoaky and maybe you’re thinking, “it’s just quilting! who cares about connection and growth. I just want to make a quilt?!” Well, that’s fine too. But for me quilting is so much more than making something awesome. Every step, every stitch, every finished project is a journey and a process and I’m passionate about connecting with the blessings