Posted on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 | By Lisa Swenson Ruble | 1 Comment

Inspired by Kaffe Fassett

Last week I wrote about my ”rip-it-out” quilt. If you read my blog, you know its long, painful history. I’m going to get two blog entries out of that quilt and talk about it again this week (heck, it took me five years to finally finish it—I can spend two weeks talking about it!).

While attending my first Houston Quilt Market, I wandered into a booth selling all of Kaffe Fassett’s fabrics. I must have visited that booth six times in two days before finally getting the courage to purchase fabric. I loved the look you see in so many of Kaffe’s quilts—pairing “non matching” fabrics—it felt like such a step out of my comfort zone, but I felt compelled to try it.

I didn’t have a pattern in mind, so I just chose 1-yard and 1/2-yard cuts. I’m a matchy person, so I looked at the quilts in the booth and chose fabric groupings I saw there. Could I really put olive green, light teal, periwinkle and moss green together? And then throw in orange, red, light pink, and fuchsia? This was either going to be a brilliant success of the ugliest quilt I’d ever made OR seen.

Fast-forward five years. As I’m cutting the pieces for and stitching the sashing around the blocks, I made a terrible realization. I don’t have enough fabric for all of the sashing. Great…five years out, what’s the likelihood that I’ll find any of these fabrics still available? Fortunately, I happened to have some current Kaffe Fassett fabrics in my studio and choose a few that will blend in. The average person won’t notice, but if a Kaffe fanatic ever looked at my quilt, they may wonder why 97% of the fabrics are circa 2005, and the last 3% are from 2011. Quick segue…do you have any quilts like this? With one or two random prints added in years after the original fabrics were purchased?

So, the quilt is done. Is it a brilliant success or is it ugly? I admit I still go back and forth, but I love it more often than not. It was my first experiment with pairing busy-busy prints and not worrying about matching. I definitely didn’t succeed as thoroughly as many of the Kaffe Fassett quilts you see (both his and those made by others using his fabric). I’ve got a lot to practice as far as still achieving contrast using these types of fabric, but it’s a decent start.

Lisa Swenson Ruble