Meet Garden Dalliance Sampler
Hey quilty friends! It's Shelley from Cora's Quilts! Over the years, I've dabbled in all kinds of crafts. Just ask me about my collection of single, hand-knit socks or my pandemic-era adventures in sourdough. But the two crafts I keep coming back to, over and over again, are quilting and cross-stitching. I've always dreamed of a book that put them together under the same cover, so I'm beyond delighted to introduce you to my new book: Garden Dalliance Sampler!
20 Enchanting Blocks, 6 Quilts & 6 Cross-Stitch Patterns
For those of you who enjoyed my Barn Star Sampler and Flower Farm Sampler books, you'll recognize a familiar structure. Garden Dalliance features piecing instructions for 20 enchanting quilt blocks, all inspired by classic cross-stitch motifs. The show-stopping Garden Dalliance Sampler quilt features all 20 blocks set in my signature sampler style.
Five additional quilts, including a second round-robin-style sampler called Indigo Garden, mix and match the blocks into flower-filled, stitch-inspired projects.
And the best part for my fellow multi-crafters? Each quilt project has a matching cross-stitch project from stitched samplers and small pincushions to a bookmark and even a fabulous 3D biscornu!
Garden Dalliance Fabrics
I know, firsthand, how frustrating it is to try to hunt down just the right fabrics for projects in a book, so I'm happy to share that I've worked with my fabric family at Benartex to design two brand new fabric collections, Garden Dalliance and Garden Threads, releasing right alongside the book.
Inspired by the wild beauty of English gardens, the collections are bursting with florals and geometric, stitch-inspired textures. They provide the perfect palette to make each of the quilts in the Garden Dalliance Sampler book, and you can find my free guide for recoloring each project on my Garden Dalliance resources page.
Strip-piecing? Yes please!
Because every quilt in this book was inspired by cross-stitched samplers and motifs, each quilt is made using only squares and rectangles, which makes the piecing fabulously simple!
Even better: all of the blocks are strip-pieced, meaning that you sew strips of fabric together before cutting them into pre-pieced rows! You'll vastly speed up your piecing and won't have to worry about sewing together thousands of individual pieces!
If you're new to strip-piecing, I think you're really going to love it, and the book makes it easy to practice: each block is pieced with 10" or 20" strips rather than 40" strips. I'd actually recommend beginning with the smallest block and then working your way through the remaining blocks in reverse order, so you can practice on a smaller scale before moving on to the larger blocks.
And if, like me, you're a visual learner, pop by the Garden Dalliance resources page where you'll find my free "Strip-Piecing Bootcamp" video tutorial, my list of must-have and nice-to-have tools, and a free guide to recoloring the projects in the book with the new fabrics.
What's in a name?
My most favorite thing about this book is the story behind the projects themselves. Because, chances are, if I'm stitching or at the sewing machine, then I have an audiobook playing in the background. My collection of quilts and cross-stitched projects almost serve as a personal library of the books I was reading while stitching.
And, as a lifelong "romantasy" reader, I started seeing a theme emerging as I named the projects: what if this quilt book was built the way my favorite novels are? Because, really what I had were six projects that moved us through a day in the life of our heroine.
An entire book filled with "Garden Dalliances," from morning calls with whispered Parlor Secrets and afternoon strolls through formal Indigo Gardens, maybe with a misadventure or two in the Hedgerow, before our heroine attended her Evening Assembly, which, perhaps, included a few stolen moments at Midnight in the Garden.
So, whether you're stitching these quilts while swooning over your favorite on-screen hand flex or working on the cross-stitched projects during a quiet evening with your favorite book playing in the background, I hope these projects transport you to that world of formal gardens, stolen glances, and the gentle art of the needle.
Blog post by Shelley Cavanna
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