A few weeks back I was reading a sewing magazine and saw a small feature in a news section about new Liberty prints at
Alice Caroline. I read on and was interested to read that Liberty and Alice Caroline had collaborated to produce new versions of familiar fabric designs, fresh colour ways and a new cheater print. Only a couple of days later, I came home from work to an email from Anna, the marketing manager at Alice Caroline asking if I'd like to try some of the new
exclusive collection, write a post and host a giveaway- you can imagine that I didn't need to think about that for long...
The best way to experience a new fabric is to make something and I knew almost straight away that I wanted to work with the cheater prints and make a snow ball star cushion cover. You can see the two colour ways of the cheater prints below- perfect for fussy cutting, hexagons, buttons, mirrors, all the little tiny things we like to make from Liberty lawn. As always, the fabric is beautiful quality, finely woven, silky soft, 137cm/54" wide and the colours are gorgeous!
Anna, shared a few details about how the prints and the new colourways were chosen - I tried not to be too envious with the thought of hours looking through the Liberty archive :
"Alice has spent years of searching rare colourways of Liberty whilst on several visits to Japan. Her collection has been inspired by colours that just aren’t available further afield. Designing the collection was great fun - Alice spent hours looking through the Liberty archive books which is an honour and very rare treat. Whilst hunting in these archives she found her favourite retro ‘Wiltshire’ fabric and took the colour theme for the collection from this, coupled together with a mint colour theme which is really popular in France. Alice is delighted with the end result: a beautiful exclusive new collection."
My inspiration for the cushion cover came from this mini doll quilt from Martha's Q is for Quilter blog. Her snowball blocks are tiny at 2", I sized up to 4" squares. The cheater print squares are not quite 4" square, they are slightly shorter in height and I comfortably managed twelve square cuts, the extra prints creeping in at the edge fitted inside the ¼
" seam allowance. I cut these, plus the mini squares for the snowballs and the cushion cover back pieces out of half a metre of fabric. It's a very efficient project with minimal wastage. My finished cushion is approximately 17 ½
" square. This is the cushion back view, I quilted between the print squares and added a lapped zip:
This is what my 4" squares looked like with the print from neighbouring squares creeping into the seam allowance:
The basic snowball construction principles can be seen in the numbered square below. Each white square (Kona Snow) has triangle corners added using print squares. I used 1 ¾" squares but you could go between 1"-2" for differently proportioned stars. Drawing the diagonal lines on the reverse is much easier when you use a board covered with fine sand paper - I use an old notebook with a large square of sand paper stuck on top.
I planned my layout so it has a scrappy but not chaotic look. It's easy to sew the blocks together as each snowball is paired with a print square, no seam matching required!
The quilting is a mix of machine stitched 50wt Aurfil and hand stitched 12wt, both in shade 2021, Natural white.
Alice Caroline have got a lovely giveaway for you- half a metre of each of the cheater colour ways so a metre of lovely Liberty in all- you do need to pop over by Thursday 6pm GMT to
my Instagram @verykerryberry to enter.
Disclaimer: I was sent the fabric used in the cushion cover from Alice Caroline in return for a review style blog post.
