Gotta Dash: Alternate Options
Gotta Dash just released in my shop and I’m so excited to finally share this quilt with everyone.
A full decade ago I was shopping for fabric scraps in an antique store and found a feedsack quilt top with a very similar layout to this. I couldn’t afford the top at the time but the design has lived in my head ever since.
Gotta Dash is an incredible scrapbuster. The cover layout would be perfect to use up some leftover jelly roll strips that may or may not be sitting in the bottom of a bucket (okay…okay….you got me…there’s TWO buckets).
I also want to talk about some alternate ways to approach this quilt to bust even more of that stash up.
Let’s talk the Queen size. The Queen size pattern of this quilt needs a slightly daunting 7 yards of background fabric. I don’t typically keep that much of a single print available in my working stash (I keep 4 yard cuts to pull from for pattern design). While I am always down to order background yardage for projects, I did start to think about what I could do to ONLY pull from my studio stash.
You know what’s been piling up on me?
Christmas fabrics.
I make a new pattern release in Christmas fabrics every year and tend to not make a second so that particular cabinet has been filling up quickly.
What if I made a Christmas version of the quilt? And not only that, but what if I split the background into two different colors?
I love how this changes the look of the quilt. It almost looks like ribbon candy now.
The fabric requirements for this layout are things I already have stashed as well.
This layout takes:
3.75 yards red
3 yards green
1.75 yards white
I don’t have to commit to using a single fabric for the red and green sections either. If I pulled ALL my red and ALL my green I could scatter them across the quilt to make something a little more chaotic.
There is something about this mock-up though. I think a quilt with just three solid fabrics like this would be beautiful.
It’s not time for me to touch my Christmas fabrics yet though. I have another cabinet that is so full the doors currently won’t close (over two decades as a designer will often create this problem). I like the idea of using the larger sections of the block for my focal fabrics and treating the dashes as my neutrals.
I’m going to be attacking my stash of Heather Ross fabrics and making a rainbow quilt layout. She has some larger prints that I’ve been hesitating on cutting down and I see a lot of opportunities here to feature those!
I’ll be using a different fabric for each block so I don’t need to worry about yardage amounts for the rainbow sections.
The Dashes for this throw size will require a single yard of fabric. The only problem here is choosing exactly which fabric I want to use.
I did think about creating a true rainbow stripe across this quilt but it didn’t work well with the fabrics I have available. There’s a lot of blue waiting in my stash so I needed those long center diagonals to use them up. So I decided to split the quilt into a cool side and a warm side. I kept glancing at my scrap piles while I was mocking this up to get a good idea of what colors I was going to be pulling out:
You think I’ll make at least a small dent in these piles?
Gotta Dash is available now in the shop and includes coloring sheets (in all three sizes) to help plan your own versions of the quilt.