City Line QAL - Week 2

City Line pattern available here

Week 1

Welcome to Week 2 of the City Line QAL. Last week we cut fabric.  This week’s task may seem short, but I recommend lots of pinning for it.  Pinning always seems to take forever, so I decided it was enough work for one week.  After all, I promised an easy pace!

Sort the Strips

First, flip back to page 1 of the pattern and sort your eight colour fabrics from dark to light as described in the lower right quarter of the page,

Thank you to White Owl Textiles for sending me
 these fabrics from their Fundamentals collections. 
Scroll to the bottom of this post for additional fabric details.

Next pair each darker fabric with a lighter fabric.  Since you’ve already cut your strips, you can put one strip of each fabric up on your design wall, or simply lay them on a table, and shuffle them around until you like the pairs.  Just remember that each pair needs contrast, and keep the darker fabric in the pair on the left.

You can see I did not adhere strictly to the instruction to pair each of the four darkest to one of the four lightest.  My darkest was much darker than the darkest light fabric, and I didn't want quite that much contrast, so I shuffled things a little more. I ended up using my darkest dark and fourth darkest dark together, and the darkest light became a "dark" paired with the lightest light.

All to say, just go ahead and shuffle those fabrics until you have an arrangement that you like, keeping the darker fabric in each pair on the left.  Also, I chose to repeat each fabric pair three times to use up all 24 strips, but you could shuffle all 24 strips for more varied pairs.  

I recommend pinning a numbered label to each strip to keep track of your fabrics once you have them ordered as you like.  I just counted 1 to 8, and repeated.  If you chose to shuffle all 24 strips, you can label them 1 to 24 to keep track of their order.

Sew Strip Pairs

Now flip ahead to page 4 and proceed with steps 1 and 2.

Step 1 is where all the pinning happens.  Matching the ends and the centers of the strips is key to ending up with a straight strip pair unit with nice even ends.  This will also help ensure all your strip pairs will be the same length, which will result in a clean, straight panel later.  Refer to this tutorial for more guidance on matching and pinning strips.

Step 2 is short but important.  Pay attention to the pressing directions. Paired with other pressing direntions in Week 4, these will allow you to nest and spin seams in the center pieced strip.

Here are my strip pairs, all sewn, with seams pressed towards the even-numbered fabrics, ready for next week.

I'm excited to see what your pairs look like.  Did you make eight pairs and repeat, or did you shuffle all the fabrics in more combinations?  Remember you can share on social media (make sure to mention the City Line QAL in your post or #citylineqal), you can email me, or you can share in the Quilting With Canuck Quilter Facebook group.

Happy sewing,

Joanne

PS:  It's not too late to join in this six-week quilt-along.  Purchase the pattern (if you don't already own a copy) then follow along with the weekly blog posts I'll publish every Monday.  If you'd like to have the links delivered directly to your inbox to avoid having to search for them, or if you'd like to make one of the bonus sizes (twin, full, queen or king) currently exclusive to the QAL, you can register for free here.

Fabrics for my version contributed by White Owl Textiles