Busy Hands Quilts: Using Your Solids Stash for the Gravity Quilt {Guest Post!}

Continuing on in our GRAVITY Quilt Along adventure...

Some of you might be looking at the GRAVITY quilt kit and thinking, "I hate to buy more solids - I wonder if what I have will work?" I know how hard it is to buy a quilt kit when you already have a lot of the included fabrics in your stash. Today our guest blogger, Tricia from My Rainy Day Designs, shares her story of how she's using her Kona stash to create her GRAVITY quilt! She's created a list of Kona fabrics to make selection easier for you!

Welcome Tricia!

Hello everyone! – My name is Tricia from My Rainy Day Designs and I am so excited to begin this Gravity Quilt and share my experience with you! I have been quilting for a couple years now; I also make small home and gift items; and I am constantly trying to push my limits and try new things, expand on my skills, and jump out of my comfort zone. I’m sure this Gravity quilt will be no exception.

I am so excited that Myra here at Busy Hands Quilts has invited me to quilt along with all of you on this Gravity quilt. I saw the Gravity Quilt advertised a few months ago and quickly ordered the book and rulers. Seeing as it used all Kona solids, I was so happy I didn’t need to order the kit, as I have slowly collected all 303 Kona solids.

Once the book and rulers arrived, I pulled my stash of the 108 Kona solids and got to work matching up colors for all the A and B color palettes in the 9 blocks. I was using the book’s printed color values to match the colors for the blocks (1A, 1B, etc.) and assigned each a Kona color, cut, and sewed the first block together – a beautiful blue/green block. I loved it. I did the same for the orange block. I didn’t love it. I moved on to block 2 with purples and golds and the same thing happened – I loved the purple block but not the golden block. Something was terribly wrong!

See – I couldn’t get the colors to match up with the colors in the book. And since there was no list to go from, I was on my own. I even (oops) changed a couple colors to match the color values in the book, not realizing just how off the colors in the book were printed! I took my 4 finished blocks to my local quilt store, and they had finished the first 4 blocks as well, and looked better, colorwise, than mine. But they didn’t have the list of block colors either. We talked about the issues, and I thought “I’ll have to start over again” and try to figure it out on my own.

When the kits came in, she told me to bring in all my Kona colors and we will sit down and figure this out. So with my stack of 108 labeled Kona solids, and her pre-packaged unlabeled kit, we sat down and matched up, color by color, and I created a list of what I think goes where. This is the Gravity Quilt Kit Color Block PDF that we came up with. As I have not found a formal printed list of assigned colors, this is my best guess. We shall see when I start again in April!

Quilting Along,

Tricia

Myra here - Even if you have a full Kona stash, sometimes a kit is still a great idea, especially in terms of time savings. I making GRAVITY with a kit. I love the ready-to-go feature. It's like icing on a cake - ready to be eaten! YUM!

You can get your GRAVITY kit at the Fat Quarter Shop and My Modern Quilt Shop, two of the GRAVITY Quilt Along sponsors.

Won't you join the GRAVITY Quilt Along?
Jaybird Quilts, the designer of GRAVITY, has granted permission to post the Gravity Quilt Kit Color Block PDF.

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