Dizzy Dresdens: Getting Started!

Alright! A new project! I so love getting started on new projects. I'm pretty sure the thinking, planning, and buying is my favorite part. I ran across this quilt in the June 2013 edition of American Patchwork and Quilting Magazine and just fell in love, sort of.

Seeing Stripes, Victoria Findlay Wolfe (bumblebeansinc.com)

I hope Victoria understands what I'm about to say is not a dig on her design at all. I quite love what she's done here, enough that I want to make one. I do want to edit a few things though. Not because what she has here is a bad design, but because, well, because I want to.

What I love:

• The border. Beyond a shadow of a doubt my favorite part and possibly what makes me want to create this. I love the rainbow effect on the white. There are tons of bright fun colors without being in your face rainbow.
• The chevrons in the dresden. What a cool effect right?
• The block on the left with the small stripes and light blue petals. It reminds me of a record. This of course means every time I look at it I have the line "put the needle on the record" from the 80s MARRS hit,  Pump up the volume, screaming through my brain.

What I could live without:

• I don't love how center heavy this is. I feel like my favorite thing, the border, is kind of getting lost and not able to really frame it well.
• The top orange and bottom blue dresden. I know it is creating the illusion that the blue and orange are pieced on rather than part of the fabric design, but I still don't really love them. They seem a little more segmented and don't flow as well as the record block.

Before taking another step, I looked to see if I could figure out where the fabric came from. It sure would be nice if quilt magazines named their fabric or at least the designer. Might make it easier to find! As it turns out, I hit the designer, Michael Miller, pretty quickly and the fabrics were easy to spot in the Striped collection.

OK - so. I have access to the fabrics and have an idea of what I'd like my version to look like. Time to fire up Photoshop and do a little, very loose, mock-up of what the changes might look like.

First, I made all the record blocks (Dance! Dance!). I put in two cool and two warm complimentary solids. I moved the chevrons to the corners and toyed with the idea of removing the points on the outside corners of each of the green dresden blocks and have since changed my mind. I also looked at adding a rainbow stripe border between the large section of green dresden blocks and the white, but ultimately decided I better not mess with any measurements when using triangles (yet).

It isn't as bold as hers for sure, but I think I like it just the same. The fabrics are here and now there's nothing to it but to do it!

If you're interested in the pattern, a smaller downloadable version is on allpeoplequilt. If you can't find the June 2013 American Patchwork and Quilting magazine, message me (google+, facebook, or susandowenby@gmail.com) and we'll figure it out.

So what do you think? Love them both right?


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Linking in with WIP Wednesday @Freshly Pieced.