Finishing off some quilt tops a couple of months ago reignited my interest in patchwork and quilting.  When Emma Jansen started a sewalong I was powerless to resist!  I really like simple quilts where the arrangement of print and colour creates secondary patterns.  Her Wake Me Up quilt is a perfect example.

The first step – and in many ways, the most important – is to choose your fabrics. I had plenty of fabrics in stash, but discovered that although they were in a variety of colours, they were pretty much all medium tones. There wasn’t much at all that was dark in colour, and even less that was light. I eventually decided that I would have to focus on different colours in my quilt top, and narrowed my options down to these ones.

I decided to do the smaller throw sized quilt top. The next step was cutting out all the squares. Thank goodness for a quilting mat, quilting rules and a fresh new blade in the rotary cutter!

Then over to the machine to chain piece half square triangles. I have to admit that I am not very competent with using patchwork tricks and techniques that can considerably speed up the whole process, but am starting to give it a go.

So now I had all the basic elements to put the quilt blocks together! There are two basic block shapes in this quilt top – a cross block:

And a ‘circle’ block.

There are also ‘part’ blocks that go along the edges of the quilt top. Emma does give another construction method for this quilt for those that prefer to work across rows with the same type of block, which I suspect is possibly a faster construction method. I did these blocks slowly, with bits of chain piecing but most just constructing one row of each block at a time. Then I laid all the blocks out on the spare bed, trying to vary the placement of the different fabrics as much as possible between block, but not always succeeding. Then I sewed them all together! Ta-da!

The finished quilt top is pretty, but really suffers from having too many fabrics in the same depth of colour.  You can see how well those darker ‘circle’ block centres pop.  If the grey fabrics had been much lighter you’d have a much better sense of the other interlocking shapes and secondary patterns that make up this quilt top.  Do take a look at the many marvellous and varied creations on Instagram to see just how terrific it can look.  This quilt top is now with the rest of the pile of quilt tops waiting to become quilts.  I’ve located backing fabric in my stash (it might require a little pieceing) and that’s now on my to-do list.  Time to get back to garment sewing for a while!