Review: Antelope Canyon Quilt Top Pattern and Kit

Patterns included in kit

Thus begins the quilt making of the year. Antelope Canyon by Laurie Shifrin Designs

A family member is getting married and therefore a quilt must be created to offer on the alter of the Pintrest Gods. I wasn't going to have enough time to go through the whole find a pattern and then find fabric to go with pattern song and dance, so I just went searching for kits. Keepsake Quilting had this one on sale and I thought that it would go nicely for a modern, Pintrest-obsessed bride who's house I've never seen and thus am unable to design for. Sadly it doesn't look like they carry the kit anymore, but you can get the pattern, I'm not sure if it will come with all the pattern info as I got shown in the picture above. The nice part about the info I got in the kit was that they had handy cutting guides with photos of the fabric making it a lot easier to keep things organized.

The only real issue I had with the directions was how the cutting directions were formatted. Although it would have taken up a lot more space, having each fabric's cutting amounts listed as bullet points as opposed to one long sentence that you have to go back through a few different times to double check, would have been nice.

But that brings me to the most important thing about this pattern. It is, for all intensive purposes, fairly easy. You have a good rotary cutting set-up, a reliable 1/4" foot, space to lay everything out, you should not have a problem with this pattern at all. HOWEVER, and I can't stress this enough, MAKE SURE YOU LABEL AND DOUBLE CHECK EVERYTHING.

All strips after they have been cut, labeled and organized by sewing order 

I spent about 2 days cutting strips. Partly because I don't really have a great deal of room to cut stuff out, and partly because I get super bored cutting stuff out. Yes, even if I am listening to new episodes of the You Must Remember This podcast.

I then spent another two days sewing the off-white pieces to the colored pieces, which is another step that is a hell of a lot easier if you have the space to keep everything organized. Once you have started to question your choices in life and made it through most of the Blacklist episodes of You Must Remember This, you will have halved the number of strips by sewing them together and it will be time to start the block construction.

a surprising amount of time spent on sewing fabric that you just cut apart back together

The top is 4 blocks, the blocks are a variation on a traditional log cabin block. The directions say to make them all at the same time, sewing each strip onto each of the 4 blocks at the same time. This works to help you keep track of where you are, keep from putting the wrong strip on the wrong side, etc. It's very good advice. in the kit each section has two different colors but no guide as to which sides you should put them on outside of the obvious. Trying to replicate the top on the cover I used pieces of post-its to help me look at the values and keep straight where I was in the pattern.

The other thing that I did to help things along was to use spray starch every time I ironed a piece back. Just an aside, I make my own spray starch as I go through quite a bit and don't like to have to throw out the metal starch containers. It's super easy to make your own, just got to any larger store like Target or Hel-mart and buy a plastic spray bottle and some undiluted liquid starch (I use Sta-Flo, because it was there and you can get like half a gallon for a dollar). You can mix your starch as heavy or light as you like, I usually use a med-heavy mix.

You thought your life was cutting strips? No, it's pinning them, this is your life now, all the pinning for forever

It took me roughly two weeks to piece everything. Mostly because I had five million other things to do at the same time, and also, it was somewhat boring. Great time to catch up on all those podcasts and audio books you've been meaning to listen to.

Once you have your blocks finished the pattern will walk you through sewing them together using a partial seam, which is super easy. As you can see from the first picture, this pattern has multiple ways of setting it to get different looks, which is really nice. I'd like to make it again with black and jewel tones and see how a different setting would look.

If you are only doing the basic pattern/kit, this would be the end. The kit included more than enough fabric to do the binding, and frankly quite a bit of all the other fabrics so that if you messed up you are pretty safe. I LOVED that about this kit. I honestly think that I have enough fabric that I could cobble together something of a matching baby quilt if the need ever arose (how's that for Pintrest cred?). The finished size of the pattern is 74 1/2"x 74 1/2". So, a good twin/double size. However, as this is a wedding quilt and thus, should probably be big enough for two people to get under at once, I had to enlarge it.
So off to boarder town we go!

IF YOU ARE GOING TO DO BOARDERS LIKE MINE DO NOT CUT OUT THE BINDING STRIPS CALLED FOR IN THE CUTTING GUIDE!! You will be using that binding fabric for the first boarder.

Completed top est size of 98"x 98"

So I ended up having 32" of the binding fabric left, I figure out that the largest boarder I could get out of it was 4" cut strips, so the finished boarder would be 3 1/2".
I looked at what a basic Queen sized quilt was and figured if I added another 8" boarder that would get me in the ballpark while not getting to big and being a decent size to quilt in. Although I only needed 2 1/8 yards to get the 8" boarder, I went ahead and got 2 1/2 so that I could use the extra on pillowcases once I get to that point. It's all coordinating crafts on deck to win the wedding present game my friends.

I use this boarders calculator all the time, as well as their backing, and binding calculators.

I got the 8" boarder fabric from Joanne's, and although I like the pattern, I'm not thrilled about the weave, but oh well. If you get the fabric from the kit you will find that they are all warm grays which makes finding matching fabric a little tricky.

All in all, I really liked this pattern and kit. I'm not sure how I am going to quilt it, I like the way they did it in the pattern picture with concentric circles, but I'm not quite sure how I can pull that off with my tiny home machine. I think I will deferentially look into more of Shifrin's patterns in the future, and will hopefully be able to do this one again in a different colorways.