Dreamlines 2023 Quilt!

Here it is! My Dreamlines 2023 completed quilt.

I decided to echo the designs of the quilt blocks with my quilting. I thought about stitching flowers in the large yellow diamonds or doing some free motion interlocking rectangles in some of the larger rectangular blocks. This is such an angular quilt that flowers didn’t feel right and it’s already so busy I thought a busy quilting design would end up as a distraction.

The backing came out of my stash. It has so many of the colors of the quilt…and I got flowers included in this quilt after all! I used a scrap of the piecing as the label on this quilt and on another one too. All I had left was a small strip of the blue and yellow peaks!

Thanks to Brenda Gael Smith for this fun year long project!

Dreamlines 2023 Quilt Top

Brenda Gael Smith is the host and creator of the free online #dreamlinesproject. Each month she has designed an improv linear strip block in two different sizes for folks who registered with her. I chose the larger format.

October’s strip is the last one for the 2023 project. Next month Brenda is going to offer ideas for putting the strips altogether. But I went ahead and created my own layout. I’ve made improv quilts which were a nightmare to sew together, but this wasn’t one of those! The pieces really went together rather well, with very few gaps.

Wherever possible, I used scraps from the pieced blocks to fill in gaps between the strips. There are only 3 filler strips that weren’t part of the original blocks. The quilt is a tad wonky…not entirely a true rectangle. I could probably block it into a true shape by steam pressing the quilt top, but I didn’t make as a show quilt, so I’ll probably leave it as is.

I’m going to shop my stash to see if I can find a back. But I’m not sure that will be successful since I don’t often by multiple yards of a fabric! And I need to decide how I want to quilt it. At the moment I don’t really have an ideas about how to do the quilting. I’m going to think on it for a while, and probably will go to Brenda’s website Serendipity Patchwork and her Instagram @brendagaelsmith to see how she’s done the quilting on other projects.

Update on Dreamlines 2023 Linear Pieced Quilt Project

It’s been a while since I last posted about my progress on Brenda Gael Smith’s #dreamlines2023 project. Brenda has been sending a new improv pieced strip pattern each month to the folks who signed up in January to do her Dreamlines Project.

There are just two more designs before we begin to assemble our strips into a quilt. Since the patterns are released on the first of the month, I expect I will sew up my quilt sometime during October. She offered two sizes of strips, and I chose the large version. It looks like it will work up to be a lap size quilt.

I pulled a selection of bold primary color solids in January but last month started to run out of sections that were long enough to complete the strips. So I’ve added some lighter colors and I think it’s turning out to be a happy accident (necessity)!

I have two strips sections of most of the patterns shown above, and the ones not shown are sometimes made with a different combination of colors.

This finished quilt is sure to be interesting!

Linear Piecing Quilt Project #dreamlines2023

Right after I made the linear piano key border for my Puss in the Corner quilt I saw a post on Instagram from a woman who, like me, had also been sewing along regularly in Cheryl Arkison’s 2022 Quilters Adventure Playcation Sew Along (#qpadventuresewalong). Her new post showed linear pieced blocks from a new year-long project she had just joined. Totally intrigued, I clicked over to see what she was doing.

Brenda Gael Smith, an Australian quilter, is hosting her #dreamlines2023 project. It consists of 10 months, January 2023-October 2023) of different strip-pieced blocks. The patterns and instructions are offered each month to folks who sign up for her newletter on her Serendipity Patchwork and Quilting website. In November Brenda will discuss ways to join the strips and December will be the month to show what we’ve made.

Brenda says this can be an improv project or a precision pieced project. Above are my January (green) and February (navy) strips. I’m using her width-of-fabric option, so for me it’s just easier to cut the fabric using a ruler. She also gives instructions for smaller strips which are fat quarter friendly.

Last year in my Quilters Adventure Playcation Sew Along quilt I used mostly scraps with pastel backgrounds, but I really liked what folks were doing with curated fabric collections. So for this project I picked a set of fabrics to use in my Dreamlines2023 pieced strips. I actually pulled solids that I often have left behind in the bin because they were too bright or too dark. Well, not the red, but most of the others. Guessing that most of these strips will use pops of colors, this seems like a perfect time to use these fabrics.

January strips and the fabrics I pulled for this project

All my fabrics are solids. But I just saw someone post some great blocks which made use of a striped fabric in the center strip. Printed stripes added to pieced stripes make really awesome strips! When I complimented her on that great idea, she thanked me but told me she actually borrowed the idea from someone else. Hmm. I might just do the same. I’m still thinking about if I want to stray from my solids-only collection.

If you want to see what folks are doing, check out these tags on Instagram. #dreamlines2023 #dreamlinesproject and the month followed by dreamlines #februarydreamlines

Or sign up on and join the fun! Brenda’s newsletter sign-up is at the very bottom of her website home page. Scroll all the way down to find it!