SWAK quilt

Welcome to my stop on the Piece and Quilt with Precuts blog hop! There have been some pretty great quilts so far and a ton more coming. I was delighted that Christa asked me to join. Have you seen her new book yet? I highly recommend you get yourself a copy ASAP so you can make all of these quilts too! Stay tuned, there just might be a copy up for grabs at the end of this post.

All of the quilts in the book use precuts from charm packs up to fat quarters. As is turns out, I have fat quarters coming out my ears and the SWAK quilt was a great way to show off a few! I picked a bundle of Joel Dewberry's Wander to work with - choosing the prints that would best contrast from both of my background fabrics.

There were still quite a few prints left in the bundle so I used a few to make a scrappy binding and a few more to coordinate the back with the front. This pattern uses only 7 fat quarters to make all those X and O blocks which leaves me with more than enough to make a second quilt. That might be kind of neat - two of the same quilt with different colorways.

Christa has this quilt in the walking foot quilting section of the book but you know me, FMQ is my BFF, so I broke the rules and changed it up. I flipped through other sections of this book and The Ultimate Guide to Free Motion Quilting to get some ideas. In the end, I kept it simple but interesting by densely quilting back and forth in the background sections to flatten those and let the prints pop out a bit. Then the prints got a loose figure eight for a little texture and that was it. I posted a short FMQ video on Instagram if you'd like to see and a time lapse FMQ video as well.

Would you like to try making SWAK or one of the other quilts in the book? Leave me a comment about your favorite - or scariest! - part of free motion quilting. I'll draw a random winner at the end of the hop to win an e-copy of Piece and Quilt with Precuts. **Please make sure you include a way for me to contact you. And for those of you with scary tales to tell below, my advice is to practice, practice, practice!

Be sure to visit Sherry and Michelle to check out their SWAK quilts today and definitely hit up Christa's blog to keep up with the entire hop, win prizes galore (no seriously, so. many. prizes.), and purchase a signed copy.

Thanks for stopping by!