Fun with Shot Cottons

When presented with a stack of solids, or semi-solids as these Oakshot Lipari fabrics are... I was a little nervous. Hesitant even. I wish I could be like the solid-user-superstars aka Ashley, Lynne, Leanne and so on. But I'm not. They scare me a little bit. I'm a print girl really. 

However, I reallllly wanted to do something nice with these Lipari fabrics. They deserved it. They are just beautiful. They need to be justified with a beautiful project. So rather than sticking them all together and hoping for the best... (which would undoubtedly be awful with my lack of solid-using skills).... I did a bunch of smaller projects taking just the amount of solid colours I felt comfortable using.

Firstly, to wet my whistle, I took the teensiest little pieces, and the cutest little mason jar kit that I got from the Sewing Summit Craftsy mixer, and made myself a pin cushion pot.

Its adorable right? I don't even know what I'm gonna use it for, but those little pieces of Oakshott heaven in my favourite colours just make me smile.

Then, in preparation for helping out in Katy's EPP class at Sewing Summit, I thought I better get on and actually DO some EPP. This is Katy's Spring Carnival block, with Lynne's Georgetown Carnival additions.

I appliquéd the block onto a light grey fat quarter background and turned it into a pillow. I kinda wish I'd stitched the pieces together with black thread, but I started during one of my Sewing Summit lectures, and I didn't have any on me. And I thought it would look weird half and half...

After appliquéing it to the background I did a couple of lines of random echo quilting with grey 50wt aurifil. I thought it might look a bit like a raindrop ripple, but now I'm not so sure.

Finally, and this is my favourite just so you know...  I took 11 of the colours from the bundle to use as feature "crosses" and  mixed them with a bunch of low volume prints from my stash to make this pillow:

Originally I was going to go for a simple plus shape design made out of squares, but then I started playing around with squares and rectangles and I kinda liked this pattern. I straight line quilted it with 50wt aurfil thread in a pale beige colour. Again, I considered using black thread to blend in with the Lipari, but ultimately decided I wanted it to blend with the background.

I tried to take a bunch of pictures of both pillows to show you exactly how the Oakshott fabrics change in different lights. In direct sunlight, they almost seem to glow! And when the light and shadow catches one block at the same time, they look like 2 different fabrics... I like that :o)

Hopefully these 3 project give you a bit more of an idea how the Oakshott Lipari fabrics can be used in different ways. It's been a bit of an eye opener for me... I'm still very much a print lover, but I love how the low volume prints accentuate the solids and vice versa. I might even, shock horror, start to build up a little stash of solids!

Oakshott Lipari can be bought from their website, here.

You can also find Kaffe Fassett shot cottons at Simply Solids. There are some great bundles in the shop at the moment, and there's 20% off EVERYTHING until the end of the month with the code "OCTOBER".