Did you know that the Kansas City Regional Quilt Festival is holding a silent auction to benefit The Sewing Labs and Once We Were Refugees? You can find out more about it here. The quilts are donated by members of the participating guild. When I heard about it, I knew I wanted to help out. I decided that I wanted to make a quilt that centered around Kansas City, so I went with the newly renovated Western Auto sign.

It’s been getting a lot of love, so now it is being offered as a 3 hour workshop at the festival on Friday, Jun 14 starting at 3pm. You can find more information here. The workshop will teach you all about foundation paper piecing, some tips and tricks, fabric selection and quilting. It will be available in 24″ and 36″ versions.

Read on to find out more about the quilt.

I designed this quilt in 4″ tiles, each tile is foundation paper pieced. Anyone who knows me knows I’m not the biggest fan of paper piecing – I don’t mind the process, it’s the repetitive-ness of it that I don’t enjoy. Well, not much is repetitive in this quilt so I really enjoyed making it.

I posted my progress on Instagram as I went (@hadleystreetquilts). Sifting through my scraps of blues and grays was fun – there are a lot of quilty memories in those scraps.

It came together faster than I thought it would. I usually made 5-6 blocks at a time.

I think I’m going to have to made another one! If you can’t make the workshop, the pattern will be available in our Everyday Stitches booth at the Festival! Hope to see you there!

I will be teaching two classes at the Kansas City Regional Quilt Festival in June. The first class is based on my Fruit Stand quilt. I will be teaching it on Thursday, June 13, click here to go to the class listing. I love this quilt, it is so fun to look at and to make. 

This quilt makes a great workshop because it is full of skills to learn – I love taking workshops where I can learn or polish a skill. The most obvious skill for this quilt: piecing clamshells! It can be a little intimidating at first – but once you know the tricks and get into a rhythm, it goes together quite easily.

You may also notice that there are some pieced clamshells in the quilt in the way of some fruit slices. These blocks are foundation paper pieced then set into a circle. So you will learn how to foundation paper piece and how to set a circle inside of another circle. When I inset a circle, I simply piece it in using a couple of pins – it’s the fastest, easiest technique that I’ve ever used.

Then there is a little applique! There are lots of ways to conquer applique and there is not much of it in this quilt. We’ll work on needle-turn hand applique and machine applique.

Finally, we’ll talk about quilting and strategies to get clamshells quilted quickly, continuously and the importance of variety!