My Caribbean Carnivale Bright Quilt Top

I love living here in the Caribbean.  The sunshine, the relaxed lifestyle, no income taxes and of course the color. Bright color everywhere.  From the ocean and beaches, to the homes, the beach bars, the tourist attractions, (the tourists themselves!) and the wonderful bright and colorful nature of our islands.

So when I saw this pack of fabric, it HAD to be mine.  Everything about it just screams Caribbean and I had to make a new quilt top.  If you've been following along with my previous quilt top attempts, you'll know that I'm very much still a beginner and enjoy the simple patterns with the quick results, and of course the very bright colors and contrasts.  This pack came with a free pattern as a quilt ‘kit' on Craftsy and it was a quick and fun sew.

Materials

The whole quilt top took a single Tonga Treats pack of Carnivale.  This is I suppose like a jumbo jelly roll.  The strips are width of fabric by 6 inches wide, so quicker to work with and more flexible than a standard 2.5 inch jelly roll.  I don't see this for sale on Craftsy any more, but they do have lots of other amazing quilt kits and fabrics.  Check out all of these amazing quilt kits and these Tonga Treats Packs.

Obviously if these crazy bright colors aren't your cup of tea, you can still make this easy quilt top with any of the 6 inch strip packs. Will you just look at this fabulous rainbow of color – makes me smile just to look at it.

Cutting

Each strip is 6 inches by width of fabric.  I cut 6 pieces which were 4 inches by 6 inches.

Then the remaining length of the strip with cut in half to make two strips 3 inches wide by about 18 inches long.

It was quick to go through with a ruler and rotary cutter and zip through the whole lot, cut all the strips in just a few minutes.  No fancy cutting required.  Each fabric strip already came folded in half, so I only needed to do half the cuts because I was cutting through 2 layers. Those little scraps in the front are my trimmings and all I had left over after cutting.

Mixing

Now if you really want to, you can plan out your quilt in the greatest of detail, but much of the pleasure of this for me came from just mixing and muddling up all of the pieces and then sewing them together in random order to see what came out.

Sewing

The quilt is basically made up of 2 rows.  The first row is made from sewing 9 of the 4 x 6 inch blocks side by side.  I'm no expert when it comes to 1/4 inch exact seams, so I took the easy and beginner-friendly decision to use the edge of my presser foot as a guide to sew all of the seams in the quilt to make sure they were all even and this came out closer to 1/2 inch than a quarter.  Use whatever seam allowance you are comfortable with so long as it's uniform throughout. The smaller the seam allowance, the bigger your quilt will end up.

The second row is simply made by joining all of the 18 inch long strips together end to end to end until you have one long length, and then joining that length to the bottom of each of the first sets of rows completed.  No thinking necessary, just lots of nice long straight lines.

You could even sew this quilt on a serger for durability.

Then each ‘block' of 2 rows is sewed to the one above and so on until all of the fabric is used.  It's a nice easy way to use up almost the entire pack.  I just had a little of the long strips left over, and that's probably because I used the larger seam allowances.

The finished quilt top

As per usual, I wasn't able to get a single photo without at least one cat hogging the limelight and rolling about on the new quilt top.  It certainly lit up my patio.  I tried to take it out into the sunshine to take photos, but I admit, the colors were almost blinding and the camera couldn't cope with the brightness.

It's too darned hot here and I'm too darned lazy to try to man-handle even a small quilt through my small machine.  Plus my free motion quilting sucks.  So this quilt top has been sent to the awesome Lucy at Granny Sassy Designs in the US for her expert long-arm quilting services.

She'll bring it back here to Cayman for the grand unveiling sometime next year, probably around April or May.  I sure do love the colors of the Caribbean, but boy, you do have to have some patience to live here.  Time seems to run slowly…”Cayman Time”.

Get your own quilt kit

Check out Craftsy for a huge range at great prices.  Shipping is free for order of $99 and the sales are even better!  Add a few of these items to your wishlist for the next supplies sale:

• All Quilt kits
• Pre-cut friendly projects
• Table runners and table toppers
• Baby and kids quilt kits
• All quilting fabrics
• 6 inch strip packs
• Mystery fabric boxes – excellent value designer fabric boxes

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