Looking for a quick quilt? My most recent finish, Layer Cake Tumble, makes use of a layer cake and junior jelly roll. And if you are thinking I'm tempting you with dessert, these are actually precut 10' squares and a half-size set of 2 1/2" strips.
As for dessert, I recently made a Grapefruit Cake. Except today I dropped it, upside-down onto my kitchen floor, Wilton turntable included. Whomp whomp. I may have used a bread knife to cut the bottom part (newly positioned as the top) off for salvaging. 😬 But you are all sworn to secrecy as to why the remaining cake has been settled into a plastic storage container.
Back to the quilt. My fabrics of choice were a Firefly Layer Cake by Sarah Watts for Ruby Star Society and a black Bella Solids Junior Jelly Roll. I adore the moths, fireflies, and mushrooms. Posing alongside the layer cake are my OLFA Splash rotary cutter and 6" Sweet Snips. Besides being pretty and in my favorite color, they are primo at their function.
If you want to make things easy for yourself, Fat Quarter Shop has a quilt kit featuring Picnic Pop by Me & My Sister Designs available. There's even a backing set to help you coordinate your finish.
If you want to make things harder for yourself, which seems to be my specialty, pick directional fabrics, and then be overly compulsive about them all facing upward. In reality, even though this pattern looks complicated, it's a misnomer. Every block is composed the same way, and constructed of only three pieces.
After a recent quilting project that I complete with a really dense, small scale free-motion design, I decided to up the scale in an effort to finish in a more gratifying time span for this quilt. I decided on a paisley using Superior So Fine 715 Ezz Rock for the top and solid black to match an Alison Glass black fabric I chose for backing. It would have been advisable to check my tension before getting too carried away, as I have some spots on the back where the top thread has pulled to the back, revealing a loop of brilliant orange and hot pink. My Albuquerque Modern Quilt Guild long-arm group, a group of talented quilters and fine human beings, suggested using a mirror below the back to get a better perspective of how things are going.
Check out the YouTube video and download the free pattern. Share your version using the hashtags #LayerCakeTumbleQuilt and #ShortcutQuilt.
