What is Fabricaholic?

Like chocolate or coffee, fabric can become an addiction. Fortunately it has few negative consequences for your health, though it can for your credit card.

Fabricaholic is about the joys of fabric, the hunting for a particular color or design, the stashing, and the creative use. My greatest moments of fabric fun come involve painting and quilting. (Art quilting, that is, not traditional piecing for which I'm not neat 'n tidy enough.)

I recently moved to the Scottish Highlands, a region with a long tradition of weaving tweed and tartan. No doubt these fabrics will soon be making an appearance in my stash too.

How to Create a Quick Background for an Applique Quilt

Creating the main design of an appliqué quilt is the most fun, so I like to get the background cut and sewn quickly. Random strips are fast and effective way to do this.

Step 1: Select a range of fabrics from your stash and lay them out on the floor or table. Rearrange, add, and eliminate the options until it looks good from across the room. (Viewing it from a distance is an easy way to spot fabric choices that don't fit well with the others.)

Step 2: Cut a strip from each fabric an inch or so wide (about five centimeters if you're metric) with either scissors or a rotary cutter. Don't worry about getting them perfectly straight as some skewness adds character.

How many different fabrics you will need depends on the final size you want your quilt to be. For instance, a quilt that's 20 inches tall will want 20 strips. When measuring, remember to allow for any border you're going to ultimately add to the quilt too.

Step 3: Stack up the strips as you cut them so you keep them more or less in the order you decided upon in Step 1. But don't obsess about it.

Step 4: Select the first two strips and sew them together. Then the next two, and so on. Make a new stack of the (now-double) strips as you go along.

Step 5: Once you've sewn all the strips into pairs, repeat the process to create sections of four strips. Keep going until all the strips are sewn together. Don't stress if you mix up the order a bit, this is creative fun not rocket science. It'll all look just fine in the end.

Step 6: Iron the background to flatten it out. It'll lie neater if you iron all the seams in one direction. I usually do it towards what will be the bottom of the quilt, so I'm not ultimately fighting against gravity.

That's it, your background is done. Simple and fast.