From A - GCQO Kick Off

It's October 1st which means that it is officially time to kick off the Great Canadian Quilt Off, eh!

To celebrate, Kelsey and I worked on redesigning the blog last weekend and even had our picture taken together since we were -gasp- in the same city at the same time! After having a lovely weekend together sewing, eating junk food and watching movies, we are both pumped and ready to get moving on our Smitten quilts.

Here's the schedule that we are working from in order to (hopefully) get our Smitten quilts finished before the snow flies

Week 1: Cut your fabric and start working on blocks

Week 2: Finish making blocks

Week 3: Attach borders and finish quilt top

Week 4: Baste and quilt

This week is all about cutting our fabric and starting to put those blocks together.

I'm planning to make my Smitten from Cosmo Cricket's Salt Air. I chose this line because most of the prints are pretty colourful (ie. not overly white) and the collection is centred around 4 main colours (red, blue, green, and yellow) which I'm hoping will mean that deciding on a block layout will be easy. I also just love the fabric and the soft weathered colours.

While I was planning this quilt, I decided that I wanted something a little bit bigger than the 64" x 64" finished quilt that this pattern makes. I also decided that I wanted to use up as many charm squares as I could AND that I wanted a rectangular quilt instead of a square one.

I will be adding another row of blocks so that the quilt has 5 rows of blocks instead of 4. I also decided to widen the borders a bit to better show off the three border fabrics I'd chosen (see the red, green and yellow prints in the top photo). With the help of some quilty math, I settled on a finished quilt size of 72" x 87". If you're interested in making the same modifications to your quilt, you'll need 3 yards of background fabric, 3/4 yards of the two inner border fabrics and 1.5 yards of the outer border/binding fabric in addition to the 3 charms packs called for in the pattern.

I've managed to cut out all of my charm squares and need to now get started on cutting the background fabric.

I've got a mug of hot cocoa and a fresh blade on my rotary cutter. Wish me luck!