Love Large heart quilt

In late January inspiration struck for a heart design using 2.5" strips. 

Did I have any strip packs/jelly rolls on hand?  No.  Was the quilt shop open?  No.  Could I wait a couple of days?  Also no.

What's an impatient quilter to do?  Raid the stash, of course!  The trick was to find enough coordinating width-of-fabric (WOF) pieces to cut enough strips that played well together.  I really thought I would have options, but these purple leftovers from Island Batik projects were really the only ones with enough WOF pieces.  

Leftover batiks from Heavy Metal, Secret Garden and Rosy Bloom
collections from Island Batik

It's a good thing these three different collections shared some common ground so I could cobble together a collection of 38 strips. Choosing the 26 to start the panel, then deciding in what order to lay them out took a chunk of time, but I like what I ended up with.

It may seem fussy to cut them all carefully to the same length before sewing them together, rather than just sewing and then trimming the resulting panel.  However, sizing first then matching and pinning ends and center of strips when sewing them together helped ensure the resulting panels were straight and didn't curve.

The rest of the strips ended up in strip sets to make units for the center inserts.  Add some huge and some medium stitch-and-flip corners, a little slicing, inserting strip-pieced bands and voilà!

I tested a different construction method for the bottom point of the heart but it didn't work well and wasted the light gold background I had pulled from my stash.  I didn't have enough of anything else to use for the background so I had to wait for the quilt shop to open after all!

While I was disapppointed not to make the quilt entirely from stash, it was for the best in the end.  This background is perfect, a much better match for the purples than the gold was.

I'm not a big fan of square quilts, unless it's a queen size, so I added wide top and bottom borders to make the quilt rectangular.  I waffled between adding plain background borders and adding decorative accent strips.  When  I decided to skip them I went back to the quilt shop for extra background to make up the difference.  When I got home, I promptly decided  the quilt needed the accents after all, so the extra background augmented the stash.

Rosie approved of the accent strips.  Who am I to disagree with the Quilt Supervisor?

Having bought fabric when I had not planned to, I doubled down on stash for the backing.  I didn't have enough of any one fabric, but I did have some larger pieces left over from previous backings.  I also had scraps of the purples I used in the heart, and a little spare time to play.

Ta dah!

Backing of Love Large using assorted Island Batik fabrics

I thought I would get the quilt finished by Valentine's Day.  I was mistaken.  Life and other priorities intruded and I didn't get the quilt basted and start quilting until March.

You know the walking foot and I are great friends.  We teamed up again for outline quilting in the strips.

It looks so different on the back!

I had planned to quilt diagonal lines in the background, but as I was looking through quilt photos for something else I remembered how I quilted the background of my batik Modern Lace.  

Using my trusty Hera marker, I marked the design on the heart quilt to see how it might look.  I love auditioning quilting lines with the hera marker.  It works by making an indentation, so it mimics a bit of the texture that quilting would give.

I felt confident enough of the design to start quilting.  

I started second-guessing my plan after quilting the lower right corner of the quilt...

...but I really didn't want to pick out what I'd done so I committed to finishing as I started.  In the end, I'm very happy with how it turned out.  This photo isn't pretty, but it does show the quilting.

I used Hobbs 80/20 cotton/polyester blend for the batting.  Combined with the low density quilting, it made this quilt light and soft with a lovely drape.  It's been couch-tested and I love it!

Writing the pattern took me a little longer.  As is often the case, something that would be quick and easy to demonstrate takes a bit more effort to describe in words and illustrations.  Thanks to these quilters who volunteered to test if those words and illustrations were clear enough to follow:

Jackie Morrical

Lessa

Barbara Paventi

Ronda Dye

Dawn

Jilleen Neumann 

Coming up with a name for the quilt and pattern was challenging.  I wanted a name that didn't already have someone else's pattern attached to it.  Guess what?  There are a lot of heart quilts, and their designers had already come up with my clever ideas for names.  In the end, I settled on "Love Large".  It's not the cutest idea I came up with, but it was the only one not already taken and it isn't awful so there you have it.

Love Large by Canuck Quilter Designs
Inspected by Rosie, canine quilt inspector

I 'm so happy with this quilt, and also thrilled that it led to two more designs.  City Line came to mind about the same time as I worked with these strips, and Love and Cuddles was inspired by Love Large's pieced backing. I'll blog about those soon.  If you subcribe to have blog posts delivered directly to your inbox, heads up that you'll be receiving more mail than usual in the next few weeks!

Time to go make supper.  I think two-bean tuna salad on bulgur with cantaloupe for dessert sounds good today.  I also have a hankering to bake, and since I can fob off most of it to my son when he pops in for a visit tomorrow I may go ahead and bake some peanut butter cookies.

What's up in your sewing room and/or kitchen today?

Joanne

Find the PDF download version ofthe pattern in my Etsy shop
or ask for a print version at your favourite quilt shop.

Jump Space

 One more quilt from my December 2025 pattern releases!   Take a look at Jump Space.

Jump Space by Canuck Quilter Designs
Fabric:  Secret Garden from Island Batik for Lumin Fabrics

You know I love floating stars with points that won't be accidentally cut off.  I dressed them up with some strip-pieced sashing to connect the blocks.  I like the mix of traditional "blocks in a row" with a fresh take on sashing.  

Stitch-and-flip construction makes a cute trimming monster...

Obligatory corner trimmings monster

...but more importantly it makes a lot of designs easier to make, avoiding cutting and sewing individual triangles. In this case it helps me float the points to keep them pointy.  That said, I know some quilters find it challenging to get consistent units so I shared my tips for best results here.

I wish I had more process photos to share with you, but looking through my photo roll I realized that little trimming monster photo is the only one I took!  I was on a deadline with this one so I suspect I got into the sewing zone and just forgot to document my progress.

Can I make up for that with extra photos of the finished quilt?  There was a bit of a breeze on photoshoot day, which was a bit challenging.  I lilke the reflection in the water, though the quilt is a little too far away to appreciate the design.

Quilt Husband's hand trying to regain  a grip on Jump Space in the breeze

This little deck at the park is usually occupied so I hadn't used it for quilt photos before, but on this particular day last summer it was empty and was just the right height to let the quilt drop.

Jump Space by Canuck Quilter Designs

I'd love to make this one again in different colors.  Here a a few options I mocked up in EQ8 in fabrics that are currently available in stores. 

I rather like this softer more traditional looking version in Belle Nouveau from Connecting Threads.

Jump Space in Belle Nouveau from Connecting Threads

The Island Batik collection below came out at the same time as the Secret Garden collection in my quilt.

Jump Space in Twilight Realm from Island Batik for Lumin Fabrics

Jump Space in Rosy Bloom from Island Batik for Lumin Fabrics

Jump Space in Salsa from Island Batik for Lumin Fabrics

The last mockup features Cottage Cove that was released in the current Conneting Threads catalog.

Jump Space in Cottage Cove from Connecting Threads

That last one definitely has a US patriotic vibe that I'm sure would appeal to many at my local quilt guild here in Iowa.  My Canadian bones require me to figure out a Canadian counterpart.  Let me pause for a moment to boot up EQ8 again.

**********************

OK, I'm back :)  I really like what I came up with...  I think I have to write an alternate version swapping leaves for the stars.   There's a little over two months before Canada Day... and if I miss that it would still make a lovely fall quilt in fall colours...and Canada Day comes around every year...

Maple leaf block in the Jump Space setting
Featuring Northcott's "Oh Canada 14" collection

Time to sign off and get to work fleshing out this new possibility!  If you don't want to miss updates, sign up to receive my newletter in your inbox.

Happy quilting,

Joanne

Find Jump Space as a PDF in my Etsy shop or ask for a print version at your favourite quilt shop.

Rib Stitch

I've been very slow getting around to blog about quilts I finished last year.  I finished Rib Stitch in December, just after a lovely, unusually early snowfall.  The snow made for a pretty photoshoot!

Rib Stitch by Canuck Quilter Designs

I designed this in the wee hours of the morning at some point last year during a bout of insomnia. I booted up my EQ8 software and started playing with HST.  Obviously, I ended up with more than just HST, but HST is what I started with and there are still quite a few of them in the quilt.

Making them a tad oversized and trimming down to perfect size is a bit tedious but worth it in the long run for accurate piecing and making everything fit together just right.  That said, after trimming 189 HST, I decided to add triangles papers to the pattern to give you the option of making the HST more quickly with less fuss and trimming.  If you're not familiar with making HST using triangle papers, you can read more about the technique here.

The two at a time method with trimming does give you a cute little trimming monster though!

Many of my patterns use stitch-and-flip techniques to avoid cutting and sewing individual triangles.  I tried to come up with a way to do that for this design, but it would have used almost double the fabric and left me with a lot of "bonus" parts to figure out how to use up in something else. I gave in to the triangles!  Look at all tose cute little triangles, lined up and waiting.

Sewing triangles requires an accurate 1/4" seam.  Also, when you're first joining things together it may seem as though things aren't fitting together properly.  Just trust my math and take a look at the detailed diagrams in the pattern that show you exactly how things should look, even if it seems wrong!

I chose to quilt Rib Stitch on my domestic Sewing machine using my walking foot.  I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to quilt, but I knew it would start with stitching in the ditch, so I started with that.  It might seem daunting to stitch in the ditch around all those triangles, but it really isn't difficult.  The key was to not stitch every side of one triangle at a time, but rather stitch a series of lines in one direction all they way down or across, then stitch all the lines in another direction.  Eventually there's stitching on all sides of each triangle without turning the quilt a bazillion times.  (I discuss examples of this approach in my guild presentation "There's More than One Way to Quilt a Quilt".  Please reach out to me if you think your guild would like me to visit by Zoom!)

After finishing all the ditch stitching, I had a better idea what I might quilt in the large parallelograms.  I used my hera marker to mark and audition my idea.  This tool makes a light indentation in the quilt sandwich, which is a great way to audition what the quilted texture will look like.

At this point I ran out of thread.  Well, out of the color I needed.  Of course this happened over the two days of the week when the local quilt shop is closed.  I didn't want to interrupt my momentum on this project, so I moved on to quilting the borders, as I had matching thread for those.  You can see below that the quilting in the borders is minimal, just straight line 1/4" in from each edge of the border. 

Once that was done, I figured it was safe to bind the quilt.  Generally, it's best to quilt the center first, then the borders, and only trim and bind the quilt after all the quilting is done.  In this case the ditch stitching and the quilting in the borders seemed like enough to be sure the quilt wouldn't wave or shrink from additional quilting.  So, I bound the quilt.

After a quick trip to the quilt shop for thread (did I buy too much, just to be safe? - yes, yes I did) I finished the quilting and headed out into the cold with my ever helpful quilt husband for a photo shoot.  It did not go quite as planned, as the tape I had used to tape rods to the back of the quilt to keep it straight failed.  I had done this with other quilts in the past with no problems.  However, this photoshoot day was well below freezing.  Even tape for "hard to stick surfaces" isn't rated for that cold.  Go figure.

Tape failure 

We regrouped without the rods, though the wind did move the quilt around a lot more without the weight of a rod at the bottom.

The lighting was great to sow off the quilted texture.  Unfortunately, it also really showed off fold creases.  

Here a look away from the creases so you can focus on the quilting.

This quilt, which I chose for the pattern cover, uses 4 fabrics plus a background.  If you use seven fabrics, you could acheive a lovely ombre effect.  Here's the seven-colour version featured in White Owl Textiles' winter catalog on page 90, pictured in their Botanical Sketchbook collection. (Check out Boxed Kisses on page 89 and Surface Curves on page 86 too!  Botanical Sketchbook fabrics will arive in shops in early fall 2026.)

For a much more exhuberakt look, I love rainbow brights on black.  The ones below are Micheal Miller Fabrics' Patina basics.

Which version would you make?  Let me know in the comments.

I'm off to bind a new quilt I'll be sharing later this month.  Can't wait to show you!

Happy quilting,

Joanne

Find the pattern as a PDF download in my Etsy shop
or ask for a print version at your favourite quilt shop.