precut fabric

Bali Pops Precuts and Bali Breezes Quilt Pattern

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Years ago, I had a quilt plan in my head that called for a LOT of different fabrics. I thought that the best/easiest way to get the fabric variety I needed would be to use precut strips, and I purchased a bunch of different Hoffman Bali Pops from the Fat Quarter Shop, and found one “locally” at the Army Arts and Crafts shop in Germany. If you’ve been around a while, you may remember this post, in which Crazy Accuracy Freak Girl had conniptions over the state of those precut strips. They were crooked and cut off grain, and I couldn’t see how you could use those strips for anything that required any accuracy at all.

I heard from both Hoffman and Fat Quarter Shop about that blog post, and there were offers to replace and/or refund the costs of the bundles which was lovely of them obviously. I never bothered with that since I’d have had to mail them back to the States from Germany, and I didn’t plan on using them right then in the end anyway.

Fast forward to December of last year. The folks at Hoffman Fabrics wrote to tell me that the Bali Pops are now cut with a laser-guided fabric cutter, and they asked if I’d like to try the new strips in a project. I chose the Hoffman Bali Pops in the Gemstone colorway, and got to work designing! Continue reading →

Hoffman 1895 Bali Batik Swatches for Electric Quilt

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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working with a new Watercolors Bali Pop from Hoffman Fabrics to design a quilt. This Bali Pop has 40 2½” x 43″ strips of Style #1895 Handpainted Bali Batik fabrics, and came with a neat color card with a list of all the colors in the Pop, including color numbers and names. Sweet, right?

I had an idea for the quilt in mind, so I fired up Electric Quilt to play around a bit. Once I had a rough design, of course I wanted to fill it in with fabrics that matched what I had in the Bali Pop. I knew that there were already some Hoffman batik fabrics in EQ by default, so I tried using those. The problem was, I couldn’t tell if I had exactly the right fabric swatches in the sketchbook on the screen compared to the fabric I had in the Bali Pop.** What’s a girl to do? Continue reading →

The Problem with Precuts

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If you follow me on Twitter, you may have already seen a bit of grousing on this subject, but I have to elaborate further here. You see, I had this sort of half formed plan (I won’t say half-baked, since that implies that it’s done but unsuccessful; this plan was just in it’s infancy) for a show quilt incorporating scrappy batiks, Inchies and machine embroidery. Don’t ask me to tell you how that was going to turn out with all of those seemingly disparate elements because I hadn’t yet figured that out completely, but it’s a moot point now anyway as you’ll see despite the fact that the Bali Pops look so pretty:

Cappuccino Bali Pop

While the plan was still forming though, I spent a lot of time searching around the Internet looking for the best price on Hoffman Bali Pops, and was really happy when a 20% off coupon from Fat Quarter Shop showed up in my inbox at just the right moment. Continue reading →