I Carried A Watermelon Quilt - Scrap Squad by Beth Helfter

One of Kimberly's latest magazine quilts, Summer Love featured in the March/April issue of Quiltmaker, was featured in the latest Scrap Squad blog post on the Quilty Pleaseures blog. Scrap Squad is a new Quiltmaker team of readers who make scrappy versions published Quiltmaker quilts to inspire you. Beth of Quilting Hottie Haven busted her stash, using fabulous greens and pinks to make her own version of this quilt. Beth is here to introduce you to her vibrant I Carried a Watermelon quilt! Say hello!



When I got the Summer Love Scrap Lab assignment, I had so much fun drawing the block and playing with the design in EQ. There were several permutations of what I was going to do, but all centered around pink and green, the colors overflowing in my stash. Before I even started sewing, these colors were screaming “Watermelon.” So the quilt had the name of “I Carried A Watermelon” before a fabric was even pulled from the bin. Don’t you love when that happens?


Once I had the basic design on my screen, my vision for this quilt was to alternate the lime and green fabrics around the pinks, which were also separated into light and dark tones. So while I made my pink and green flying geese for the block centers, I built the flying geese with a lime on the right and a background on the left, then combined a darker pink goose with a lighter pink for each block center.


For the first set of block sides, I sewed the lime to the left and the background to the right along with my ultra light pink background to form some more flying geese, then matched up the fabrics in the geese with those in the centers and sewed them to the block centers.


One of my favorite parts of my version of this design is the hot pink corners of the block, as they really helped to give the quilt huge dimension. I built the remaining flying geese with two-colored backgrounds, hot pink on the left for the dark greens, hot pink on the right for the light greens.


Once all the geese were cooked, I sewed them together into strips with the hot pinks on the corners, then threw those strips onto the remaining sides of the blocks, making sure not to repeat any of the greens. Love how the light/dark/light/dark marches right around the block, just as intended.


Knowing I was naming this quilt after watermelon and Patrick Swayze, I decided to make the sashing squares black to represent the watermelon seeds, and the sashing strips a bright lime green, because I am sure I wore something of that color when I went to see Dirty Dancing in the theater in 1982.


The setting triangles were cut from several different pinks and set around the quilt in a light-to-dark fashion. I cut my left over pinks into 4 1/2" strips and just barely had enough to make it all the way around. I placed the darker borders on the side with the lighter setting triangles, and the lighter borders on the sides with the darker setting triangles, and I believe that was the perfect way to continue the light/dark movement of this quilt. To this day, I have no idea what possessed me to miter the corners, but it sure looks pretty!


Isn't it amazing to see how color and placement can completely change the look of a quilt? We hope you make your own version of the Summer Love quilt with scraps from your stash!

Labels: , , ,