Sweet Strawberry Quilt Along: Week 1

We’re so happy to have you here for our Sweet Strawberry Quilt Along! We thought this would be a great way to say farewell to summer and all the juicy berries we got to enjoy during the season. Since this is a small quilt, it’s great for a baby or wall hanging. It’s also quick to make, just like most of the other quilts in our book.

For our quilt in this quilt along, we will be following the directions for Sweet Strawberry that are found in our Piece & Love Book. This is the only place you will find this pattern, so you will need the book to follow along. If you still need fabric, you can find a super cute kit from Quilted Treasures.

First up, cut out the fabric for the strawberry. This is the greens, reds, pinks, and black (everything except the background and binding).

You can see in the above video that we have layered our fabric to make the cutting go more quickly. If you want to try this, here are a few tips: don’t do more than four layers, make sure the edges of the fabric are lined up so you don’t cut a hidden layer too small, and press the ruler down firmly to keep things from shifting. It really does save a lot of time once you get the hang of it.

Once all the strawberry fabrics are cut, including the diagonal cuts, it’s time to move on to the background fabric. As we mentioned before, we’re using this yummy blue crossweave, which is the same one we used a few years ago for our Swoon Sixteen quilt.

Even though crossweaves can be more difficult to use, we love them as backgrounds. You just have to be careful to avoid stretching or unraveling. The texture they add to a quilt is unparalleled.

That’s it for week one! Next week, we will start putting these blocks together. In the meantime, you can share your progress in a couple of different ways:

• On Instagram, use both #sweetstrawberryqal and #theclothparcel hashtags in your post. You can also tag us @theclothparcel.
• In our private Facebook group, you can share photos in a post or in the comments of any of our posts. You can also ask for help or advice there!

See you next week!