Yesterday, we debuted a brand new pattern in partner with Aurifil Artisan Sheri Cifaldi-Morrill of Whole Circle Studio. The Andrà Tutto Bene Quilt was inspired by the posters and banners seen in the windows & doorways of homes in Italy — created by children as a symbol of hope and resilience to help communities work through this difficult time.
For our launch, Sheri featured two versions of the mini quilt — one with embroidered wording and one with printed wording. To help illustrate other techniques, we reached out to some of our favorite Aurifil designers to showcase their own versions of Andrà Tutto Bene.
Pat Sloan has long been a part of the Aurifil family. She has been a dedicated Aurifil user since our thread first became available in the US and has run our Aurifil Designer of the Month series for the last 11 years. We adore working with her and always love seeing her creative take on a pattern.
Pat chose to create a new mini inspired Sheri’s pattern as she is sheltering in place at her home in Virginia without access to a printer for foundation paper-piecing. She worked up an appliqué rainbow partnered with embroidered lettering. You can see more of her process over on her blog.
Pat’s go-to thread for her appliqué projects is our incredibly versatile 50wt. She absolutely loves that she can always find a thread color to match her fabrics and that it is just thick enough to accentuate her projects without taking center stage.
When doing appliqué, she prefers using a blanket stitch. In this case, since the rainbow strips overlap, she only topstitched on the top side of each color. The one exception was violet– since it was the last piece added and therefore on the top, it required top stitching around all borders.
Another fantastic finishing technique for fusible raw edge appliqué is the straight stitch. Pat uses this method as a starting point with many of her students. Stitching a rainbow is perfect practice!
After completing the appliquéd rainbow, Pat turned to the typography. For this mini, she choice to embroider her words using Aurifil 12wt thread. She has included her lettering on her blog post, along with the quilt mini layout.
First, print out the lettering. Using your preferred marking tool, trace the letters onto the desired location of your mini. Prep the Aurifil 12wt for stitching. We recommend cutting a piece no longer than 18″ for easy, tangle-free stitching.
Pat prefers not use a hoop for her embroidery, but we understand this might be personal preference. If you plan to use a hoop, center the hoop around the first few letters and secure.
A simple running stitch is perfect to bring these words of hope to life!
To finish the mini, Pat quilted the pieced background with a simple wave meandered stitch and also stitched close to the blanket stitching on the blue and orange rainbow units to secure.
For the full tutorial, downloadable pattern, and added tips, visit Pat’s website.
Thanks so much to Pat for joining us in sharing this important message. We’ve got this and Everything Will be Okay!!
ABOUT PAT
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Pat Sloan is a designer, author, and lecturer, and with her weekly radio show, Pat truly is the “Voice of Quilting”. She has a deep passion for making quilting fun for herself and everyone around her. Pat loves to hang out with quilters on the internet as well as visit you in person. Be inspired to get more done!
Having sewn since she was a child and quilted for over 20 years, Pat eventually looked to her craft as a business. After a few years quilting she started to teach quilt making to others and then turned her skills to pattern designing. She found that she really enjoys designing and seeing how other quilters made her patterns. In 2000 Pat’s designs became so popular that she and her husband Gregg formed a design and publishing company called Pat Sloan & Co. In addition to designing and publishing her work, they now travel around the country teaching and showing her quilts to quilt guilds and quilt shops. Also, Pat has had her designs published in all the national magazines, she has written 31 quilt books and has designed many lines of fabric for Moda Fabrics.
Visit her website for more info.
Beautiful Artwork.