All this month, we’re sharing more about our 2023 Quilter’s Planner designers. The next designer we’d like to share with you is Karen Lewis of Karen Lewis Designs, who designed the Letter Day quilt. We are so happy to have Karen back again this year!
Karen is a screen printer, quilt designer, author of Screen Printing at Home and Wabi Sabi Sewing, and fabric designer for Figo Fabrics. Karen works with thread company Aurifil pairing her fabric collections with their threads, and has now produced four collections to sit alongside her fabric. Karen teaches printing and quilting workshops around the UK and overseas, including Denmark, Norway, USA and Canada. She is part of the UK-based The Thread House with fellow quilters Jo Avery and Lynne Goldsworthy. She lives in Leeds, Yorkshire, with her husband and three grown up children and much adored Cockapoo Scout.
The Letter Day quilt uses simple piecing to achieve a high-impact design. Our version is baby-sized, but you can easily add more blocks for a bigger quilt!
Tell us a little about the fabrics you worked with for your project.
I used my forthcoming collection Hampton Court with Figo Fabrics shipping to store this Autumn! I paired it with coordinating Figo solids to result in a playful fun multi coloured quilt.
Why did you decide to make this quilt, and can you tell us a little about the inspiration behind it?
I wanted to make something fun with my new fabric collection and wanted to combine it with solids as I enjoy seeing places for the eye to pause when there are a lot of prints going on. The quilt design itself came from playing around with Flying Geese blocks and adding rectangles onto them again to provide areas of calm and keep things simpler.
What was the most fun part of doing this project?
All of it…I loved making this quilt! From pairing the prints with coordinating solids to moving the blocks around to get a cohesive quilt to that final stitch and seeing how it turns out. You never really know until your quilt is completed whether it will actually work as you envisage and when it does, you love it!
What are your favorite quilting techniques?
Whilst I love traditional blocks and playing around with them, my true love lies in hand sewing, whether it be needle turn appliqué or English Paper Piecing. I just love the mindful, gentle nature of it and being up close to every stitch. As a consequence you won’t be surprised to know my favourite quilting technique is also by hand!
Do you work on one project at a time, or several at once?
I am the world’s worst for sticking to one thing! I constantly have far too many projects to count on the go. I am my own worst enemy with this, not able to keep my mind on the thing in question but it constantly buzzing to a gazilion others!
What color do you have the most of in your stash? The least?
I would say blues. I love all shades of blue but in particular denims and indigos from dark through to light. The least?…probably browns…and purples…although I love a pale lilac so have quite a few of those. It really enhances a colour scheme…particularly all my blues!
Thank you, Karen, for sharing more about yourself and this lovely project!
You can follow Karen online at www.karenlewistextiles.com and on Instagram as @karenlewistextiles.
