Tiered Treasure

It's no secret I love scrappy quilts and quilts made from my stash. I created a membership based on stash-friendly quilts, after all, and I'm having so much fun designing and making alllll the scrappy quilts 😊 This newest Stash Artists pattern is no exception! Allow me to introduce you to Tiered Treasure.

The name is a nod to both this being my take on a classic coin quilt and the fact that our stash is every quilter's treasure. 

I've been looking at coin quilts for a while, thinking about making one, but not really wanting to just have simple stacks of 'coins'. When I turned alternate blocks in EQ8, I started to get excited about the design. When I added a smattering of friendship stars (my favourite star block), I knew I had to make this quilt!

Do you have a particular direction friendship stars are supposed to spin? To me, they look backwards if they spin to the left, and you may notice these ones are, in fact, spinning to the left. I made the stitch-and-flip units without thinking about which direction the stars would spin, and was rather surprised to find I had all my stars going the 'wrong' way. Oops! I wasn't about to piece them all again, though, so I'm just saying these ones were designed for all the quilters who feel this is the correct way for friendship stars to go 😆 If that's you, you're welcome! Also, isn't this little ladybug adorable?

I love using a solid fabric for the background in my scrappy quilts. I feel like it tames the crazy and lets the scraps shine. For Tiered Treasure, I thought about using black or white for the background, but would have had to buy more of either one. Grey, on the other hand, I have in abundance after buying a full bolt a couple of months ago, so it was the obvious choice. Plus, I do love how scrappy quilts look with grey. See Love Birds, Pinwheel Garden, Scrappy Playground and Ombre Twirl as further proof!

As you can tell from these pictures, there are a lot of batiks in my stash. One of the things I love about batiks is that they don't have a right or wrong side. Apparently, though, it's still a good idea to pay attention in case the design on the fabric has a right and wrong side! Hopefully, whoever ends up as the recipient of this quilt won't mind a few backwards numbers.

At 58" square, Tiered Treasure isn't a small quilt, but I still used one of my batting off-cuts for it 😊 I had a piece of batting that was twice as long as I needed and more than half as wide, so I simply cut it in half and sewed it back together with a wide zig zag stitch to make a frankenbatting to fit. I think I usually avoid piecing batting scraps together for the same reason I avoid pieced backs - figuring them out feels like more work than I want to put into it, lol. One seam is manageable, though.

For the backing, I could have used the same grey I used for the background, but that felt boring, so I used this blue solid instead. I love the bright zing it gives when a corner is flipped over!

I did use grey for the binding, partly because I accidentally cut too many strips when cutting for the front, and it was conveniently the exact number of strips I needed for binding. It felt meant to be!

I chose my go-to double loops for the quilting, done with Aurifil 2600, which I also used for the piecing. It's the perfect match for the background, plus it blends beautifully with all the other fabrics. In this picture of the back, you can really see how imperfect my double loops are, but they still look great, which is one of the reasons I love quilting them. They're also really quick and easy to stitch, two more reasons I love them 😊

If you love stash-friendly, scrappy patterns like Tiered Treasure, get on the Stash Artists waitlist so you'll be notified when the membership doors open again in November.

And before you leave, did you know I'm having a pattern sale? All patterns in my shop are 25% off through Monday, September 9th! Shop the sale now 😊