Słodki

Hi peeps! This week you are getting the real inside scoop and skinny.... its a little peek behind the scenes of how I design my BOM quilts. The next BOM is called Słodki, which is Polish for Sweet. The reason its called that is that the quilt has been inspired by vintage Polish tapestries and kilims. I have had to much fun designing these motifs and fitting them into a quilt that I could do about ten quilts I think!! Theres a very real possibility that I expand this to a book after the BOM is over and do a load of other smaller quilts with a similar theme. In my spare time!! :D

The BOM opens for subscription on April 1, you can register your interest (which means you'll be sent a heads up email when its open!) at my website right now. www.sarahfielke.com

This is obviously not the finished sketch, and things in what I'm about to show you may or may not be the same in the finished quilt. This time around I'm going for a lot more piecing, with appliqué added​ on the top - kind of a cross between The Secret Garden and my new log cabin that I'm working on (only a little bit of progress on that shown below, but I've been busy with work things!!). I'm planning on piecing it from solids with all the appliqué stitched in prints, like with the log cabin - I'm really into that way that looks at the moment. 

I started to design this quilt about 6 months ago, but it's only in the last 2 weeks that anything has actually gone down onto paper. It's been growing and changing in my head over those 6 months, when I have a quiet moment, or I'm awake in the middle of the night (can we just talk about menopause for a millisecond.... Will I ever sleep again...ugh) I take it out of my mental inbox and turn it around and over and round again. And then when I'm ready I start to sketch individual blocks and components, and only then it starts going onto graph paper.

At the moment of showing it to you, this is what it looks like. You can see it still needs some components dropped in, and things need moving and resizing. 

As I go along, I identify sections that aren't quite working for me and pencil them in.

So that I won't have to redraw the whole thing a million times over, I tend to make changes on smaller pieces of paper, and then shift them around to see how they look or what needs balancing.

Once I get everything drawn out and I'm "finished" (ha!), I will go over the whole sketch with a pencil and circle the parts that are appliqué. 

After that I start to work out how the blocks will be constructed, the sizes and shapes and what can be the same sizes to minimize complication and the number of templates. Then I go through each pieced section and work out which pieces will be physical templates and which will be printed for the piecing and the appliqué so that the template sets can start being designed and worked on. 

Finally, the sketch will be completely hand drawn again onto plain paper, then sent to Oscar to be tidied up in Illustrator. He basically goes through and makes my hand drawn lines a little tidier where they need to be, and makes sure that shapes are isolated so that they're easier to colour in for the colouring sheets!

And then we show it to everyone. Thats the bit where I really don't sleep! Every time I release a Block of the Month design it's like sending a baby out into the world. These things live inside me for such a long time that there is always the terror that I'm the only one who will like it :) That's when I have to look at my favourite magnet above my computer and remind myself

hahaha 

Anyway I hope you all have a wonderful day, and that you like the look of Słodki and you consider joining me to make this sweet thing from August 1! Oh, and here's the update on the log cabin that currently has no name.

Happy stitching 

Sarah x