Birchen - À la Quilt Matters

Happy Monday all! I'm thrilled to be participating in the Fat Quarter Shop's Birchen Blog Hop today.

We're using Art Gallery Fabrics (woo hoo!) so I chose to use the Prisma Elements line of fabrics for my version of Birchen. I LOVE this line. For my quilt, I chose Zirconia, Apricot, Solar Quartz, Larimar Sea, Pagoda Gem and Sapphire Sparkle, with the idea that the aqua (Larimar Sea), yellow (Solar Quartz) and orange (Apricot) would pop against the darker colours.

I found the most perfect teal Aurifil 4182 and yellow Aurifil 2135 for the quilting. The teal worked beautifully for the back as well. The quilting is very simple for the moment, but I'll be adding in more.

I picked Time is Deer Coal in the Indelible line by Katerina Roccella for the backing. Love! Almost too pretty for a backing, don't you think?

The quilt finishes at 72" by 72".

If you've seen the pattern, you'll probably notice that I modified a couple of things:

• This was the first time I've chosen fabrics for a quilt entirely online. One thing I missed I think was that there wasn't a lot of contrast between the Pagoda Gem and the Zirconia. Even the Sapphire HSTs blend in that block. In hindsight, I think I'd print the fabric swatches from the site in grayscale to better see the values. 
• It was also the first time I made HSTs using HST paper templates. Very cool! I'm not sure it was really a time saver, but it certainly made more accurate HSTs!
• I used three fabrics (Sapphire, Apricot, and Solar Quartz) instead of two for the J/K strip set. 
• I added in a row of Sapphire and Pagoda Gem HSTs to Block One. 
• I also switched my block pairings. I originally planned to pair the large Sapphire HST with the Zirconia, Pagoda Gem and Sapphire HSTs, but found it was too dark. 

Such a fun pattern! I can't wait to see what the other blog hop participants have done with it. Check them out on the Fat Quarter Shop blog!

The Birchen pattern is available for free from the Fat Quarter Shop site. They also have a quilt kit available! They've also put together a fabulous video tutorial.