The Caswell Quilt

One of my favourite online quilt shops is Threadbear in Australia, I love the patterns they carry and when I saw the new quilt by Corliss I had to order the pattern. The Caswell Quilt was inspired by a famous carpet of the same name in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and features thirty blocks of appliqued flowers, leaves, birds and butterflies.

I love Threadbear patterns, this one is over fifty A3 pages printed on good quality paper with colour pictures of each block and full size templates and placement diagrams.

The postman delivered it yesterday and as I now have an empty project basket following the great tidy up, I felt justified in starting to pick fabrics straight away :)
I have been asked how I choose fabrics for my quilts as I very rarely follow the original colours and almost never buy kits. I normally start with what I have in my stash, I buy fabrics I like with no particular plan from the US at sale time and have a good selection of small pieces (FQ's or less) plus a couple of pieces of yardage to choose from. I also buy smaller pieces here in the UK at quilt shows etc, mostly layer cakes or Fat 1/8th bundles. This time I was drawn to the colours in this fabric by Barbara Brackman for Moda from her 'Lately arrived from London' collection. I have a two yard piece of this pattern 8196 'The Seaflower'

I am not really keen on the zigzag border of the original quilt, so this may become a border instead with a narrower teal border/binding.

I knew I had four yards of a fabric that might work for the backgrounds. I bought it online for a different quilt thinking it was neutral dots only to find they were pink! It is Marsha McCloskey Staples IV 920-42

Now that I have the large pieces sorted I start to pull scraps and FQ's of anything that I think I might want to use. I started with the greens as there are a lot of leaves etc in this quilt.

I then started pulling the aquas and yellows that I liked in the border fabric along with some fuchsia.

I find it really useful to refer to a colour wheel at this stage. While I firmly believe that you can never have too many fabrics in a quilt, I do think you can have too many colours. Golden Yellow through Spring Green to Aqua sit together on the same side of the colour wheel and will work well, but the effect can be a little safe. Opposite colours always produce a vibrant quilt, the Spring Green/Green opposites are fuchsia and magenta I add some of these two colours to provide a little sparkle.

All the possible fabrics will sit together in the basket until the quilt is finished.