Pink Lemonade Quilt Pattern Now Fat Quarter Friendly

Are you a fat quarter lover?

I remember when I first started sewing how drawn I was to the cute size and fun prints! It seemed like the perfect sampler size. You didn’t have to commit to too much yardage, you could sample lots of different prints, and they fold up to this cute little bundle.

I love them so much I have an entire shelf in my fabric cabinet dedicated to fat quarters. It makes it easy for me to plan my quilt projects based on fabric requirements. If a pattern calls for a fat quarter, then I can easily find that fabric cut in my stash.

That’s one way I try to make pulling fabrics for my quilts easy peasy. To make your fabric pull sessions even easier, oftentimes, a fabric designer will release their entire collection as a fat quarter bundle which is the perfect little sampler to play with!

They make picking fabrics for a quilt a no-brainer. Grab a fat quarter bundle add in a little bit of yardage and bam you’re ready to dive into cutting!

You also have the option of just focusing on fat quarters, which is the approach I wanted to dive into a little more with you today!

The new fat quarter friendly Pink Lemonade Quilt Pattern is ready for instant download.

This post contains affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, if you click through and make a purchase, I may receive a commission.

What’s so special about fat quarters?

Before diving in, I thought it would be fun to share a few reasons why fat quarters are the darling of the quilting world.

You can:

• Make some cute projects with just a few fat quarters.
• Pick up lots of different prints from a collection without having to commit all your fiber dollars to just one print
• Store them nice and easily
• Work with them easily without having to wrangle a bunch of yardage (especially helpful if you’re working in a small sewing space).

Plus, they’re just too cuuuute!

What’s a fat quarter?

If you’re sitting there thinking “ok, Shannon, I get it, they have lots of benefits, but what the heck is a fat quarter?”.

Ha! Yes, I probably should have started with that!

A fat quarter (or FQ as we lovingly call it in the quilty world) is a pre-cut fabric measuring approximately 18”x21” (sometimes 18”x22.5”) it really depends on the width of the fabric and whether they include the selvage or not. It’s cut from an 18” piece of yardage that’s then cut in half along the WOF. Yardage is typically 44”, which is why when you cut that in half you end up with 22” (including selvage).

Despite its smaller size, it’s amazing how many pieces you can eke out from just one fat quarter.

The best part is if you want to pick up an entire fabric collection without committing to too much yardage then a fat quarter bundle is the perfect option. I love picking these up so I can sample all of the prints and then select my favourites of the collection to then grab some of it in yardage. Or, if I want the focus to be on the prints, I can add some solids to allow the prints to really sing.

So many fun options!

Aerial fat quarter bundle

One of the best parts about being a quilter is being a part of the quilting community. When I joined the Montreal Modern Quilt Guild I was lucky to meet some stellar quilters and one happened to be the very talented fabric designer Tamara Kate. I was lucky to connect with Tam and have the chance to play with several of her collections and support her new launches.

Here’s a few projects I’ve made featuring Tamara’s gorgeous prints:

• Spring is in the Air – featuring Frolic
• Rainbow Plus (aka Plus Infinity Mini quilt) – featuring Frolic
• Reverberance – featuring Joy
• Heart Mug Rug – featuring Aerial

What I love about Tamara’s designs is they’re normally inspired by nature and have a whimsical feel to them. They’re typically colourful and have lots of fun details to draw the eye in. Her Aerial collection has all of those qualities in spades. I absolutely adore the colours and found it super hard to narrow down my hero print for the back.

Working with fat quarters in your quilts

What’s fun about working with a FQ bundle is you have some options on how you use all those prints.

While I love every single print in the Aerial collection, I decided to pull some colours that fit the theme that I was going for.

Specifically, I knew I wanted to make another Pink Lemonade quilt, but I wanted this one to be fat quarter friendly. Sometimes you just want an easy go-to make. So, I challenged myself to just use fat quarters. I wanted the feel of this one to be girly, fun, and cheerful.

To achieve that, I opted to focus on all the pink, yellow, lilac, and white prints from the collection.

With so many prints going on, I decided to add in some Ruby and Bee solids in shades of pinky corals and yellow to help tie everything together and keep it from being too visually busy.

Pink Lemonade Quilt x Aerial

With my fat quarters selected now came the fun of mixing and matching how I wanted to feature each of those prints using the Pink Lemonade quilt blocks.

This was such a joyful step in the quilt-making journey. I encourage you to savour this step and really play around and see which combos you love the best. This is my fav way to ‘discover’ new combos that I might not have initially thought of.

Plus, it gives you the chance to just feel the fabrics and be up close with the prints to see which ones really captivate you.

Here’s how those prints look pieced together in this baby Pink Lemonade quilt.

The quilt back

I already mentioned that I loved the prints and colours in the Aerial collection and found it hard to narrow down my backing print.

The issue?

I was torn between the yellow and lilac colourways of this print.

It was the print that caught my eye from day one of opening the fat quarter bundle. Does that ever happen to you? You go through the prints and one stands out right away as a fav? That’s what happened here with this print. It was love at first sight!

While I debated back and forth between the colour options, I went with the initial print and colour that caught my eye. Yellow seems to be a recurring colour in my quilty practice, I think it’s the fact that it’s such a happy joyful colour. Since this is a baby quilt, I wanted to keep that joyful spirit throughout the project; the yellow seemed the perfect choice 😊

Quilting

Deciding how to quilt your quilt can be a tricky step. There’re lots of directions you can go in and narrowing down the ‘right’ one for the quilt in question can lead to analysis paralysis – ha!

For this baby quilt, I wanted the feel of the quilt to be soft and squishable. That meant I wasn’t going to go with dense quilting (dense quilting = heavy and stiff). I started by machine quilting straight lines on an angle. My plan was to go with a crosshatch design, but after doing the first pass of lines I hesitated.

My concern was that I didn’t want to take too much focus away from the prints and detail of the quilt design. Plus, I was kinda digging the look of just the simple diagonal quilt lines.

Here’s a tip – when in doubt, step away from your project for a few hours or a day or two. Come back to it with a fresh perspective and see how you feel. I find this approach often leads to clarity: either it solidifies how I initially felt or I see things in a new light and decide on a new direction. Sometimes the best action is no action until you know exactly how you want to proceed. Don’t feel like you need to rush through your decision process.

I opted for 40wt Aurifil Thread in this glorious pink to keep the quilting lines blending in with the overall look.

Binding

I’m always amazed at how much binding changes the look of a quilt. It really is such a fun detail to play with in your fabric pulls. For this girly Pink Lemonade quilt, I went with the lilac print and then decided to up the quilty texture by going with big stitch hand binding in 12wt Aurifil Thread.

If you want to give this technique a go, check out the step-by-step big stitch hand binding tutorial that also includes a video tutorial 😊

For all things quilt binding, refer to this handy 4-part Binding Tutorial Series.

The big question now is, what fat quarters are you going to feature in your Pink Lemonade quilt?!

Get your Pink Lemonade Quilt Pattern in the shop.

Happy quilting!

xo

Shannon

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