Four months ago, I took up the challenge of creating a Stashbuster Quilt with a layer cake. I thought, “how hard could it be?” I had done so many with fat quarters. I, confidently enough, figured I could make at least 5.
In all honesty, I have never been attracted to layer cakes. I think I'm beguiled by the fat quarter bundles so there's no attention given to other precuts. Imagine my surprise when I looked at my stash and found 3 layer cakes!
When I think about it, the first layer cake bundle was gifted to me. The second one was an impulse buy when I was shopping with a pack of quilters and I had to buy something. And the third was a ‘pity purchase’ when I was the only person at the store.
So I peeled them out and was stunned that there was no commonality between them. Each layer cake had different colours, different numbers of colours, and various ranges of colour. There were different patterns, a different number of patterns, a different quantity of those patterns.
I was determined to find one quilt pattern that would make sense for each of the three bundles. I spent months trying different quilt designs, but nothing worked for all three layer cakes. Finally, one day, I woke up and realized symmetry would be the solution.
To prove that it would work, I needed to test my theory on all three layer cake packs. My first two quilt tops I showed the making of in my video, "Stashbuster 6- The No-Fail Layer Cake Method". Unfortunately, I ran out of time to make the last one.
For the last quilt top, I had a Christmas themed layer cake to sew up. While I played with layouts on the PreQuilt.com app (click here to find my Stashbuster 6 pattern), these stars appeared which I thought would suit the Christmas theme. So instead of making the layout from pre-made blocks, I took the PreQuilt design and reverse engineered it.
I also decided that I would get a bit fancier by putting the red and green in different quadrants. Luckily I had the same amount of green blocks as red to make this happen.
There was this awful moment when I realized one block was turned around—rip rip rip. Finally, I added a jewel in the middle to add a bit of attention in the middle.
Now I have three tops to quilts. You can see how the first two quilt tops look by watching my last video here. Stay tuned
And if you haven't watched my video on '10 things you Need to Know About Precuts', click here.
