Dublin Fancy Quilt Along: Week 1

Yay! Today’s the day! My quilt along for “Dublin Fancy” starts today! I am SEW glad you’re here! If you haven’t got your pattern yet, you can order it here. You can view the quilt along schedule here. If you’re joining us late, you can still sign up as long as the quilt along is still going. I’ve been dropping lots of reels on my instagram over the last few weeks. Hopefully they will help you with making your quilts! I’ll refer to the appropriate video(s) each week in the blog posts for the quilt along.

I had some labels made for this pattern! If you want a custom Dublin Fancy label with your name on it, you can get one! I order all of my labels from Melanie at Souther Charm Quilts/Meander and Make. They are great labels. You can get order your Dublin Fancy Quilt label here. Just be sure to select “Dublin Fancy Label” to get the one that looks like the label pictured below. I’ll have pictures of the other labels from that listing soon! Full disclosure: that was an affiliate link meaning I earn commission, but it doesn’t affect the price you pay. Use the coupon code SNUGGLEBUGSTITCHING for 10% off.

This week, we’re going to be getting our fabrics together and cutting pieces. For this week we will only be cutting the pieces for the chain blocks. The cube blocks are strip pieced. So, we’ll deal with cutting those later on after we make all the strip pieced units.

If you’re not sure what I mean by the chain blocks, this is a reference to an Irish Chain quilt. A traditional single Irish Chain alternates between solid blocks and a nine patch block. The nine patch blocks make up the “chain” design in the quilt. It’s a simple pattern that’s also super fun and has lots of possibilities! In the pictures below, you can see a more traditional Irish Chain that I made a few years ago next to my most recent Dublin Fancy quilt made from beautiful Benartex Fabrics. The name “Dublin Fancy” came about because this is my spin on a traditional single Irish Chain. I have pinwheels in my nine patch blocks and “fancy” cube blocks where the solid blocks would have been. So, my pinwheels make up the chain.

Fun Fact: I was originally a little torn on the name for this pattern. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to call it “Dublin Fancy” or “Jelly Cubes”. Can you guess where I got the “Jelly Cubes” name idea from? Anyway, there are a few people I always consult when I’m trying to name my patterns. For this one, my mom, sister, and daughter voted for Dublin Fancy. My daugther threw in the very helpful tidbit that the original Dublin Fancy Quilt just didnt’ look very jelly. I’m not really sure what “very jelly” looks like, but apparently that wasn’t it! She says the new one with the purples (pictured above) doesn’t look very jelly either. So, that made me feel a lot better with the reassurance that we chose a name that works for different color schemes. Mr. SnuggleBugStitching voted for “I Don’t Care”. I really should take him off that list since he always votes for “I Don’t Care” even though it’s never one of the choices. One day I’m going to name a pattern “I Don’t Care” in his honor.

This one does a have a bonus pattern, Sound Waves Baby Quilt. It’s a quick and easy baby quilt and makes a perfect gift for a new mom. You’ll have some units leftover from your Dublin Fancy quilt that you can use to make the bonus project baby quilt. We won’t make the bonus quilt in this quilt along, but you’re welcome to make it and tag me on it. I love seeing your quilts! I also have a stand alone pattern for this one and did a quilt along for this one last fall. You can check out the posts for all of my previous quilt alongs. I have the links to them organized for you on my Quilt Alongs page.

Confession: I’ve been keeping super busy lately with my usual custom orders plus lots of other fabulous opportunities I’ve been blessed with this year. So, I ended up making my quilt and taking all the photos ahead of time. With my current workload, I have to stay on top of things or I’ll stress over it and drive myself crazy.

Selecting Fabric

For this quilt, I like to use a darker fabric for the pinwheel foreground and lighter fabric for the background so that the pinwheels really pop. For the jelly roll, I like to use one that has a good variety of colors in it so that your cube blocks end up looking really scrappy, BUT, this is just what I like. Your quilt, your rules! I’ve seen this quilt made with the opposite color scheme of light pinwheels and darker background, and that looked great too!

What to chose for backing and binding? For backing, I find myself going for dark backings a lot of the time. Why? There are a few things I like about dark backings. I firmly believe in quilts being used and loved. It’s perfectly appropriately and lovely to hang them on the wall to just look at, but the ones we have at my house get snuggles. I’d certainely not be above throwing a quilt on the grass for a picnic either. So, I like dark backings because they wouldn’t show those grass stains. The other thing I like about dark backings is that light colored thread shows up nicely on the back so that you can see my quilting. My t-shirt quilts are a great example of this. You can see how well light thread in quilting pops on dark backing in the picture below. This is another your quilt, your rules thing because if you don’t want your quilting to so up as much, light thread and light backing would work better for this. If you stick with me for very long, you’ll find that I use the “your quilt, your rules” line a lot!

For the binding, something to consider is the scale of the print. If you use a fabric that has large scale print, the design will be completely lost in binding because it’s just too skinny. If you’re only picking it for the colors and don’t care if the print is unrecognizable, then this won’t matter. You can use a fabric that contrasts nicely with your backing or the same fabric you used for your backing. I’ve tried it all, and it all looks nice. It’s just comes down to personal preference.

Cutting your Pieces for the Chain Blocks

I’ve designed the cutting on this to be as simple as possible. You’ll get plenty of time consuming cutting when you start trimming your half square triangles. So, I see no need to make these initail cuts any more complicated or time consuming than they have to be. I’ve designed this one so that all of the squares you need to cut for the chain blocks are the same size to make your cutting go faster. I’ve also designed the cutting instructions so that you can fold the fabric in half selvage to selvage and cut make all of the cuts two layers at a time.

Each Week on the Blog

I’ll link to all of the other weeks near the end of each post. I will add each post here as I have them. You can also find this on the Quilt Alongs Page.

Week 1 – You are currently at the Week 1 Post
Week 2 – Make 5 Chain Blocks
Week 3 – Make 5 Chain Blocks – Plus a new tip for half square triangles!
Week 4 – Make 5 Chain Blocks
Week 5 – Make Strip Units; Make 7 Cube Blocks
Week 6 – Make 8 Cube Blocks
Week 7 – Assemble Quilt Tops

Prize for this Week

Our prize for this week is going to be a PDF of my PNP Pumpkin Block Pattern and a forgeround kit that I cut myself for making a quilt top using 25 of those blocks . All of the pumpkin pieces are cut out for you! Add in scrappy background pieces from your stash for a super cute quilt top! This one is for US winners only due to shipping costs. If the winner is an international quilt alonger, I will send you 2 PDF patterns so you don’t miss out on getting a prize.

To be eligible for prizes:

– You must be following me @snugglebugstitching on Instagram and post progress pictures for the week on Instagram by Tuesday at 5:00 PM Central Time. You must tag me @snugglebugstitching in your posts and use the #dublinfancyqal and #dublinfancyquilt.

-I will announce the winner on Instagram and tag the lucky quilt alonger so that they know they’ve won. The winner will have one week to contact me to claim the prize. Any unclaimed prizes will be forfeited.