Today, I am sharing the first of three different quilts we made using Brilliance. Meet Brilliance in the Goldie Quilt Pattern!
The Goldie Quilt Pattern is a Fat Quarter friendly yet scrappy inspired pattern. It is a really fun take on strip piecing, 9 patches and the traditional bear paw design! The throw size quilt finishes at a 63" square and that's what we made. We used 20 out of the 24 FQs in the bundle and before I jumped into making the Goldie Quilt, I created several mock ups. I knew the colors I wanted to use for everything but the background. These mock ups show a variety of other Kona Cottons as background options before we landed on using Kona Ocean.
The mock ups show the background colors as follows: Salmon, Lavendar, Acid Lime, Black, Scone, Terracotta, Willow and Ocean.
There really wasn't a "wrong" choice but something about this deep rich blue won me over. Once I confirmed the background fabric, I organized my fabrics and started cutting!
After all my fabric was cut, then it was time to mix and match all of my cuts to create my block piles! I leave the long sashing side aside to make care of it later in the make. If you have any hesitations about mixing and matching your Goldie cuts, I have a blogpost all about it here! I wrote this during our Goldie SAL back in early 2023.
Alysson and I both tag teamed sewed these blocks together. I designed this pattern, wrote it, did all the math and diagrams for it, edited it. AND, I still every time I make it have to rip stitches because I accidentally mess up the HST angles in the Bear Paw section. So if it happens to you, don't worry, it happens to me!
Here are all 9 blocks and the last one is my favorite! So much so that we actually made a sticker based on it!
When working with a mix and match pattern, it can feel chaotic at times. Each fabric combination can feel harsh or equally too soft. But my encouragement for you is that if you start with a color palette you LOVE and you feel is balanced, it will all make sense in the end. And that is how it is with Goldie. You have to trust the process.
Once they are all lined up together it's like a sigh of relief... awww... it totally works and looks great!
The last step before sewing the top all together is to make the long sashing pieces. These are the 3 piece strip units that create the long sashing between the blocks and the rows. I do not put too much stock into what colors go where, I just try to make a similar balance - some high contrast, medium and low.
Once the final seam is done, we have a quilt top! For this quilt specifically, I wanted to photograph the back so we can see all the seams. It is like stained glass.
I really really love the dimension of this quilt. There is a lot of sparkle, nuance to the color change in each block and it creates a beautiful shimmer effect.
My friend Emily of So Sunny Quilts worked her magic on this quilt. Because the Goldie Quilt has so many sharp angles and a lot of piecing, I wanted a pantograph that leaned a bit to the chaotic feel but more smooth. I chose a design that had a lot of curves and it is called Raindrop on Water.
The texture is perfect and adds the best feel to the quilt top. I chose the Raindrop on Water as a sort of ode to using Kona Ocean as the background color as well. It felt like the perfect merriment.
I backed this Goldie Quilt with Kona Grapemist - one of my all time favorite colors. And I bound it in Kona Tangerine for a bright frame of the quilt.
The Brilliance Bundle has been such a fun project, it pushed me a bit out of my comfort zone with using so many oranges and reds and warm tones. But it has been such a nice study in mixing and matching tones and colors that I don't usually use.
