Do You Need a Rogue Fabric?

I was a productive sewist yesterday and got 44 of the required 88 half-rectangle triangles for the commission quilt sewn and pressed. (“Half-rectangle triangles” does not roll off the tongue nearly as easily as “half-square triangles.”) They went much faster than the first set I did for the center of the quilt because these are all one color combination. As soon as I make the remaining 44, I can slice all of them up to make the Delectable Mountains blocks that comprise the final two borders. I still have some work to do, but the end is in sight.

As a reward to myself for my industry, I sliced up one of the fabric combos I pulled yesterday morning (the floral one). I wanted something relatively quick and easy. Layer cakes—10” squares—are my favorite place to start for easy quilt blocks. Charm squares—5” blocks—are easy, too, but I am rather tired of them given how many comforter tops I’ve made recently.

“Layer cakes” was a term coined by Moda, one of the fabric manufacturers, to market their pre-cut fabrics. (A roll of forty-two 2-1/2” strips is called a “jelly roll.”) A layer cake usually contains forty-two 10” squares of an entire fabric line. The fabric line might be made up of a dozen different prints, so some of the fabrics are repeated within the layer cake. I like to make my own layer cakes. I took that stack of fabrics I pulled and began slicing the fabrics into 10” squares. A couple of the prints were fat quarters (18” x 21”) which only yielded two 10” squares. The larger remnants provided more squares. The idea is to come up with a good variety using the fabrics available.

Quilt designers have come up with all sorts of unique ways to slice and dice layer cake squares into fun quilt blocks. I’ve done Double Sliced Layer Cake blocks in the past, but for this quilt, I am using Framed, a quilt tutorial by Ann Ferguson for the Moda Bake Shop (see what they did there?).

The first step, after cutting, is to pair up the 10” blocks randomly. Here is where things got interesting. That navy blue floral focus fabric had a tiny bit of periwinkle blue in it. I had pulled a matching periwinkle blue floral out of the stash and cut it. When I put it with the other fabrics, though, I felt like it was fighting with them. I took it out and cut more 10” blocks out of some of the other prints to make up the difference. I paired up all the blocks and went to bed.

My subconscious was hard at it while I was asleep. I woke up and my first thought was about that periwinkle blue fabric. I decided it needed to be put back in with the other fabrics. Mary Fons, in her book Make + Love Quilts, talks about the need for “rogue fabrics” in a design. She maintains that many quilt designs benefit from a fabric that is just a tad off-kilter. I don’t like matchy-matchy quilts, so this concept resonates with me. I suspect that periwinkle blue may be the rogue fabric I need for this quilt.

The blocks are made by stacking two 10” squares on top of each other and cutting strips off each side, leaving a square in the middle:

The fabrics are separated and the center squares swapped out to give a positive and negative of that fabric combination:

I’ll sew up a few squares and put them up on the design wall and see what I think about that periwinkle blue. It might work or it might be an unmitigated disaster. I’ll let you know.