Cherish Quilt - Bring Out Your Tricky Prints!

There are prints you have in your stash but you don’t really know how to use. Perhaps they’re peaches with really dark green leaves, or sweet dog heads floating in curlycues or big, solid rain-clouds floating on a white sky. Prints that when you cut into them for small English paper pieces, you end up leaving them out. They’re too busy, too big, too strange in other quilts. But Cherish quilt loves them!

Last year, I decided to make a home for all these tricky prints in a low volume Cherish Quilt. I don’t really collect them on purpose, but my stash is full of them. They’ve come in fat quarter bundles or they’re leftovers from backing fabric, and they’ve outlasted everything else in my collection. They’re often novelty prints, often high contrast, and often large scale so they don’t get used as backgrounds or basics. (Learn all the ways I use low volume fabrics in this post.)

I picked out all the prints like this that have a white background, and then I troweled through my low volume (light/white/pastel) prints for the borders. Despite never really having a use for these tricky prints, and despite them being odd or quirky or beautiful but not very useful, this quilt came together like a breeze.

There’s something about low volume quilts that come together so effortlessly. I’m still mindful of contrast and colour combinations, and I still like to match up the light blue round with the flowers in the centre, or choose a plaid for that round because the one next to it is scattered and organic. And, I definitely dig out all of my basics to balance out the tricky prints. But I do all of this with the underlying certainty that I’m not going to get to the end and it’s going to be too busy or too loud. This happens to me often with my regular quilts. I drag out all my favourite scraps, sew them together, pin it up on my design wall, and realise that I’ve forgotten to add some relief. It’s all high volume, super useful basics (my most used fabric, and therefore my most common scrap), and what it really needed was the occasional rain-cloud or curlycue - the fabrics I find hard to use, and never make it to my scrap baskets. Bringing them out on purpose, and building a quilt around them must have started my quilt off on the right foot. I’ve got contrast and relief built in from the beginning.

For my last Cherish Quilt, I took this same approach, brought out all my tricky prints and feature prints and novelty prints and made the hexagons first. While digging through my stash, I found an old Ruby Star Society panel full of these fun motifs. I admit that I did need to take a moment before I cut into it, because there was a lot of fabric I left behind, but then I decided it was highly unlikely they would get used for anything else, and dove in. Aren’t they fun?

Do you have fabrics like this? Fabrics you never reach for because they’re big or loud or tricky? I highly recommend pulling them out for Cherish Quilt. Those big, centre hexagons are just made for them! Use them as the starting point, build borders around them like a picture frame with fabrics that help show them off or bring out their best, and you’ll be on your way to making a quilt you really love.