Welcome to the Reindeer Ridge Quilt Along

Welcome to the Reindeer Ridge Quilt Along! Although we haven’t officially started sewing (we’ll start January 3!), I like to give myself plenty of time to plan colors and purchase fabric. So let’s start the sew along planning today!

Today, I’ll walk you through my process of choosing colors, and hopefully by the end, we’ll all have our fabrics picked out!! High five!

Reindeer Ridge uses 5 colors. You can, of course, get creative and add more and change things up. For this quilt along, we’ll be following the pattern as written, but I’ll try to give some tips for those who are changing things up along the way.

One of the things I love about this quilt is when you have the tree as the center, it gives off a very woodland vibe. While the snowflake definitely leans towards winter and/or holiday themes. Our first task is to choose if you want the center of your quilt to have a tree or a snowflake.

center options – choose tree or snowflake!

Now that you’ve chosen the tree or snowflake, let’s think a little about the theme of your quilt and the color palette. Sometimes when I’m not sure of what I want, I just start searching for color palettes that inspire me. I love using Pinterest to help find color ideas. Just search for the theme of your quilt with the words “color palette” after it.

A few theme ideas to search:
–Tree in center: woodland, forest, evergreen, deer, fall, rustic, retro, autumn, etc.
–Snowflake in center: winter, holiday, snow, vintage christmas, festive, pastel, mountain, moody, etc.

I’d love to hear what other search terms you use to find a palette! And if you don’t want to search for yourself, you can steal one of my ideas on my Pinterest board.

When choosing colors, I start with deciding on the background and reindeer colors first. I think the quilt looks best when one is dark and one is light. For example, if you want to use a light background, make the reindeers in a dark color.

Light background with dark reindeer vs. dark background with light reindeer

Coloring:

Your purchased pattern includes a coloring sheet with both the tree center and the snowflake center. I’m also excited to announce this pattern is also available on Quilt Ink to color digitally! It is free and you don’t have to create an account (unless you want to save your coloring). They have tons of colors available to play with and it makes trying out different options SO fast and easy!

Ordering fabric:

My quilting patterns all give a little extra fabric in the materials list to cover for straightening crooked fabric or a minor cutting error. But because of this, it is possible you will have some extra fabric when your top is complete. I like to skip buying the binding and backing fabrics until this stage. Then I can use any extra fabric for those parts of the quilt to save money.

About this quilt along:

This is a slower paced quilt along. I’m a mom of 2 little daughters and I want to make sure I have time for them and to give lots of great content for this quilt along. I also hope the slower pace will allow more folks to participate and to not fall behind. The pace for this quilt along is about 1 hour of sewing per week. A few of the months might take a bit longer, but that’s what I’m aiming for.

Another unique feature of this quilt pattern is I give you all of the cutting information at the beginning of the pattern. For me, I find it easier to just knock out the cutting for the whole quilt at once. It’s a little tedious, but once it’s done, I only have the fun parts left, sewing everything together!!! Our quilt along will also start with doing all the cutting first. But, if that’s just not your jam, you don’t have to!! Each section also has the fabric listed that you need to have cut. So you can take it section by section.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me via email: hello [at] michellebartholomew [dot] com or via Instagram.

If you’d like to share your color palette and see what other people are doing, post on Instagram with the hashtag #reindeerridgeqal . I’ll be sharing on stories as well as in my feed. I’m not giving monthly prizes away for posting, but I hope we’ll all have a great time sewing together 🙂