The Modern Holiday Quilt Collection - Angry Clown Edition

I will be honest, this was mostly the brain-child of my bestest quilty friend, Meghan aka Then Came June, who very graciously asked if I'd like to collaborate with her on it. I was feeling pretty burnt out at the time, but my gut said, "DO IT!" and I'm so glad I listened. It's been a really fun eight months working with Meghan! She's extremely talented in SO many ways, hilarious, and I so admire how driven and business-minded she is. I can be pretty intense when it comes to work-related stuff, but Meghan and I not only agreed on nearly every decision and how to execute them, but she challenged me to push myself a little farther than I normally would. We made a pretty awesome team if I do say so myself

Meghan and I decided we would design four holiday-themed quilts, each of us taking the lead on two of them, and that they would be modern and beginner friendly. I designed the quilts for Christmas and Valentine's Day and Meghan took over for Halloween and Fourth of July. Her Halloween quilt KILLS me. If you haven't checked it out yet, I give you full permission to abandon ship AKA this post and go look at it instead. It is THE CUTEST. But then come back here when you're done because I've got a hilarious tale to share about the making of the Holly Jolly quilt.

Remember when I mentioned how intense I was? Well, this is a great example of what I meant...

So when I chose to do the Christmas quilt I almost immediately knew I wanted to do holly berries. I wanted the berry blocks to look randomly placed on the quilt - like someone had just laid a bunch of holly berries down on a flat surface and they were ready for a Pinterest-worthy photoshoot. I had a vision and I was SO excited about it, but very quickly realized how challenging this idea would be. To make this quilt traditionally pieced and not appliqued or paper pieced in the style that I wanted was going to be really difficult...


I was determined to make it work though and luckily I had Meghan there to bounce a bajillion (wish I was exaggerating) ideas off of. I ended up going through about three different versions of the idea. Each version had 20 different spins on it. I think I text Meghan non-stop for three days straight trying to figure out what to do.


And thus I introduce to you a photo montage of the evolution of the Holly Jolly quilt...


This was the first idea and pretty close to the final design. But I still wasn't 100% happy with it, so I played around with it more and landed on this...


I liked how this idea had more of a Scandinavian vibe, but after making one of the blocks I noticed it sorta reminded me of a face. And specifically a very hostile clown-like face 🤡


I did everything I could to make the clown less angry, but I only made it angrier...


So, I think you all know what happened next, we lololol'd A LOT and then, sadly, the clown was killed off #ripberrytheclown

Then, after bouncing a couple more ideas/versions off of Meghan, I basically ended up where I started . Cue the violin music for Meghan, right?



Tomorrow Meghan will be sharing more details about her amazingly cute Ghost quilt that you won't want to miss! And come back here Sunday when I share a much less entertaining blog post about the I Heart You quilt