Modern "It's Complicated" Cheater Quilt Panel

This is another in my series of posts about cheater quilt panels available from Spoonflower.com.

This is "It's Complicated" by mainsail_studio available from spoonflower.com.  (The designer states the quilt's name was inspired by "the beautiful ups and downs of a marriage"). It was printed on 2 yards of their wider cotton sateen fabric.

I was immediately drawn to the designer's fantastic use of color alternating with the zig-zags of white and several light greys.  It's such a fun vibrant design!

Putting this many colors and triangles into a digital design is a challenge. It's just not easy. There are places in this print were the color slips out of the lines and other places where there are gaps where the elements of the print abut.  These aren't visible from a distance but are up close.  So the print isn't perfect, but the design is about a marriage...and what marriage is perfect?!

Thoughts about designing cheater quilt panels:

One thing I've noticed on cheater quilts panels is that without the seam lines, it's often difficult to see the intended block layout when light colors/light greys are used.  What the designer intended to be a half-square triangle or a flying geese block ends up looking like a floating triangle. However, quilting these panels in the "virtual ditch" does make it possible for the eye to see the intended block.

Cheater Quilt Panel + Pieced Blocks: "Field Puzzle"

When I designed my "Dogs at the Farmers Market" fabric last summer I discovered that it was difficult to fussy cut the fabric without wasting more of the adjacent design than I wanted to.  It was a good lesson to learn early in my fabric designing adventure.

In my last post I introduced my "Fox and the Four Seasons" fat quarter panel available at spoonflower.com.  I designed it so it can be cut into blocks.  It's a first step in thinking about how to design a "cheater" quilt panel. Before I do that, I decided to see what other indie designers on spoonflower.com have done with "cheater" panels.  This quilt was made with one of 3 "cheater" quilt panels I've purchased.

This is "Puzzle Wholecloth/charcoal ombre" by ivieclothco. I love the printed ombre which could be pieced, but would be a challenge to collect the perfect colors. I've added pieced blocks around the perimeter and appliqued 2 blocks onto the central panel to make it my own.  I used two other designs by ivieclothco, "Bunnies White on Charcoal Linen" in the blocks and "Double Chevron Gray Linen" as part of the binding. 

The fabulous sheep fabric, "Black Sheep Sanctuary" is also from a spoonflower designer, christinewitte.  I used the color way in her fabric to pull fabrics from Karen Lewis' "Blueberry Park" collection and used Kona® for the solid colors, both lines from Robert Kaufman Fabrics.

I kept the panel intact for this quilt.  It wasn't possible to cut the wholecloth panel into blocks. It was intended to be used as printed so there was no seam allowances in the design. 

It was a lot of fun working on this project.  Here's the back. The main fabric on the back was in my stash.

Field Puzzle back

In my next 2 posts I'll show a quilt where the designer designed a quilt panel that could be used as-is or cut into blocks.