Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Karla Alexander's Curved Ruler Quilt

Karla Alexander is one of my favorite quilt artists.  I have gotten to know her thru Greenbaum's Quilted Forest.  She does fabulous patterns and she has some wonderful rulers to go with her patterns.  One of her patterns is called Inferno ...I've been waiting for just the right time to start this lovely quilt and last weekend was it.  I went to a 3 day quilt retreat on the Oregon Coast...oh, what fun it was.  I stayed up till the wee hours of the morning sewing and having great conversation with my friends.

I started the quilt...but I have to say that I ended up doing my own version of Karla's...I am not even close to being done with the blocks, but I couldn't wait to show you what I have been creating.

Karla's pattern is pretty easy:  stack up 4 fabrics sized 9" x 13"

Isn't this Peacock Fabric just Beautiful!  We just got the collection in our shop two weeks ago and it's just about gone.

Using Karla's really cool ruler that has HER name on it (lucky girl)...


Lay Karla's Ruler on top of the stack:


Do you see in the picture there are curved lines on the ruler?  Those lines are split so that you can put your rotary cutter down thru the slits to cut the layers of fabric.  I only cut 4 fabrics at a time, but stacked a total of 12.


After the strips are cut, I do a shuffle with the fabrics.  I start with stack number 2 and take 1 fabric off the top and place it on the bottom of the stack.  Then I go to stack number 3 and take 2 fabrics and place those at the bottom of the stack and so on.  Now when I sew them together I will have a different block every time.

Now...let me be clear at this point!  I don't have a picture of  the strips sewn back together and I apologize.  Maybe I will surprise you in the next week and sew one so you can see what it looks like.

After I sewed the strips back together I had a square.  I then cut the sq. with my rotary cutter and sliced it diagonally.  Then I sewed a skinny little strip of the green into the block.  Then I took a 8" Triangle and cut 7 1/2" triangles from the square.






I've started to sew some of the triangles together to get a better idea of what it will look like as a quilt.


I am loving the look...it feels like ART in progress.

I highly recommend you check out Karla's quilt and website...she's so talented!

3 comments:

  1. That looks like a fun quilt! I lover her books and patterns too and have done several of them.

    thanks for your comments on my blog. Since you don't have your email enabled (in Edit Profile) I can't respond back to you.

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  2. Wow, I'm with you till the step where you sliced the square diagonally; did you slice both diagonals? Then add the green and slice and shuffle to make the new triangle? I'm going to have to give it a try to see.

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  3. what great ruler hopefully it will be on sale in the UK soon

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