Hearts Quilt in Memento and a New Workshop!

I have a new Hearts quilt in Memento and a new workshop!

Hearts Workshop with carolyn friedlander

Hearts Quilt in Memento

We’ll start with the Hearts quilt in Memento. I’ve made several projects using my Hearts pattern, but with new fabric at a new fabric company coming out, I knew it was time to make another one.

Hearts is the simplest of ideas, and one you can do a lot with. It starts with a charm pack, or it did in this case. I love being able to see many fabrics and colors in the same project, especially when it’s a hand work project, because you get to spend some beautiful time with each one.

Memento fabrics on a speckled fabric in polar background

After much consideration (see some of the alternates below), I decided to go in this beautiful blue direction for the background. (It’s Rashida Coleman Hale’s Speckled in Polar.) Because of all of the different colors, you could go in any direction you want, but I liked this one.

If you are working with a lot of different colors and prints for your appliqués, like I am here, I think that the way you lay things out is important. Don’t worry about picking a background fabric that makes everything pop perfectly, that can be hard/impossible, but instead play with your positioning so that the shapes pop in places to create movement and interest for your eye. The Hearts pattern features a very regular layout of the shapes, and with the variety of colors and values in the fabrics, you have added visual variety and interest.

Other Directions Using Memento

Working with Ruby Star Society means I am making more digital mock ups. Just like with Bartow, I have some alternative Memento directions for Hearts too, and I thought it would be fun to share. Which do you like the best?

Alternate colorways for Hearts Memento quilts

Both use the Memento charm pack, and they are even ordered in the same way. The version on the left uses Speckled in Shell, and the version on the right uses Speckled in Caviar. Border and binding are both Memento fabrics. Seeing these both are making me want to make another.

A New Workshop

This newest Hearts Memento quilt is all part of a new on-demand workshop that you can watch time and time again from the comfort of your own home. Hearts is the perfect starter needle-turn appliqué project, which is why I wanted to turn it into a workshop. The shapes to tackle here are pretty much what you need to know in hand appliqué. There are soft curves, outside points and inside points.

Here’s the trailer.

In the workshop, we go over everything. We talk about all of the projects I’ve made with Hearts so far, we talk about fabric and supplies, we talk about my thoughts on making this new one. I show you each step of prepping, cutting, and laying out your project, and then we do the appliqué itself.

Finally, I show you how I quilt it. This is really fun, because I actually used one of my computerized designs with OESD first, and then I free motion quilted on top using my BERNINA longarm quilting machine. The workshop is over 2-1/2 hours long, because it is so in depth. Don’t get overwhelmed by that amount of time. Every step is divided into chapters that you can skip around, pause and repeat as needed.