The Ruth Quilt in Purl

I wanted to share a little more about the cover version of The Ruth Quilt Pattern and a little more info about picking fabrics for your own version.

Here are some quick tips to help with your fabric selection: 

• Pick a sashing fabric that will stand out from your background fabric - it can be a print or a solid, but colorful, large scale prints generally won't be the best choice.
• For your blocks - when I was making my quilt, I found that using a darker value fabric at the center of the "x" shape worked best with a lighter value fabric surrounding it. These can be fabrics that are the same color (this will create a little bit of a transparency effect) or they can be different colors.

Notice that for my quilt, there are some very dark valued fabrics and some very light valued fabrics. I was very careful to make sure that they are distributed evenly around the quilt. Darker valued fabrics tend to draw your eye and if they are all concentrated in one place, that will draw your focus.

If you have a pattern where you are trying to draw focus to a single spot, that is great. For this quilt, since the blocks are all the same, we want to create movement by distributing the values around the quilt. A great way to test this is to take a black and white photo of your quilt top with your phone - it will make this difference more obvious.

I have made this pattern now a couple of times and both times I used a pretty muted sashing fabric. I would really love to make a version of this quilt with really dark print or even a stripe - how fun would a red and white stripe be for a Christmas quilt?

This quilt works great as a stashbusting project. I think it would be really fun to use a bunch of different valued prints from a single color - it would look scrappy and be a lot of fun and would be a great way to pare down your fabric stash a little bit. 

I quilt almost all of my quilts on my home machine, but this one was quilted for me by Heidi from Piece and Joy Quilting - she has quilted a few quilts for me over the past couple of years and she is fantastic.

I am excited to share my pattern testers' quilts with you and to see what you make with the pattern - make sure to check out #theruthquilt hashtag on instagram to see photos of the quilt.