Conifer

Conifer! Conifer! Conifer!

I had this idea to make pine cones last year when I put together the Gremlin’s Christmas stocking. When I started it, the strips were too tiny, you couldn’t see the fabric, and I was worried it looked like piles of (reindeer poop). I also didn’t have it separated out into blocks; you built the whole thing as long rows then stacked the rows together. It was not a very forgiving pattern to put together, but I thought the overall effect was cool. So I tucked it away in my noggin until I figured out how to fix it.

This spring, Ruby Star Society was looking for designers to play with fabrics from their upcoming lines. Ruby Star, you say? New fabric lines, you say? The perfect time to finesse a design! No pressure. I was drawn to Rashida Coleman Hale’s line of basics called Speckled. It has a huge range of hues that I thought would make the perfect rainbow forest. Thankfully, Ruby Star agreed and decided to kit Conifer!

It’s a snap to kit, or to make your own kit from your stash. You need two jelly rolls’ worth of strips to make the pine cones/trees and then a contrasting background. Presto change-o, you have a quilt-o.

Since Speckled was a blender line with so many different pieces, we had fun turning our Conifer into a rainbow gradient. It’s like those fun colorful bottlebrush trees you see at Christmas!

And since I figured out how to make it block based (yay) instead of building the whole thing one row at a time (boo), it’s really easy to modify and make a smaller quilt like Figo did with their After the Rain line.

If you’d like to snuggle under your own forest of pine cone tree good-ness, click here to get the pattern from Etsy.

It’ll leave you pining for more.