Looking Ahead to Twilight Gardens in 2017

Our trip to Quilt Market in Salt Lake City this past Spring was truly inspirational, as always. There are countless beautiful quilts, and more fabrics than you can even imagine. In fact, you almost have to turn off your sensors after a while, as every turn bombards you with more choices. 

In the genre of Taupe, one rarely finds a lot of choices, however.  Although the popularity of the Taupe palette has risen noticeably over the last decade, with more and more Japanese quilts finding there way into the shows here in the U.S.; Compared to main stream designers and fabric lines, it is still a small share of what you see at Market. So, you can imagine how excited we were to see this stunning quilt hanging in the Diamond Textiles booth.  
Twilight Gardens is a new quilt design from Pam Curo of Cotton Tales Designs. I have known Pam for over 10 years, and carried many of her patterns. She has always been a great designer and pattern author, both in cotton and in wool, and her preferred color palette seems to be muted country colors to darker primitive shades, with Taupe falling right in the middle. Twilight Gardens was designed exclusively for muted, textural yarn dyed cottons. The colors in the quilt are subtle, and the light values seem to sparkle against the black and darker toned backgrounds.

I immediately found myself in a discussion of how I could bring kits for this quilt to my customers. One World Fabrics is one of the largest retailers of Taupe palette yarn dyed cotton fabrics, and this was the perfect quilt to showcase what we offer.

The pattern is written in the Block of the Month style with each block receiving it's own section. Pam has divided the quilt into 10 blocks/sections, with the last section being devoted to bordering, and finishing the quilt. Although this can be a fun way to receive kits, it adds a large amount to the packaging and cost of the kits, not to mention all that shipping. With an eye toward economy, we have opted to package the entire pattern and all the fabrics as a single kit. We will then do a series of blog articles covering fabric organization and placement, and block construction monthly, for those who would like to make the project as a BOM. This is really advantageous as it gives you more freedom of fabric choice and placement throughout the quilt's construction. The kits include the same fabrics as the original sample, and are generous, providing a wonderful assortment. To minimize fraying and waste, we do not recommend that you pre-wash your kit fabrics.

Yarn dyed cottons do tend to shrink a bit more than print fabrics when washed, however using 100% unwashed yarn dyed fabrics in the quilt, any shrinkage that occurs after the quilt is finished, should be uniform. I like to lay out all fabrics from the kit and organize them by size and color family. This will make selecting block and applique fabrics so much easier. Reading through the entire pattern is also very helpful, to familiarize yourself with the overall construction method and sequence. 

I look forward to hearing comments from you all once quilt construction has commenced in January.
Fabric kits for the Twilight Gardens quilt can be purchased from One World Fabrics by following the link below.

Twilight Gardens Kit pre-order

Hope you will join us.

Steven