Quilter’s Mixology – Paint Drips

This post is part of the Quilter’s Mixology Sew Along. For details and schedule, click here!

Today’s post is from Becca at Bryan House Quilts. Becca has a new book out this spring called Modern Rainbow, and it’s available for pre-order now on Amazon! I can already tell that this book will be right up my alley!

Hi there! I’m Becca from Bryan House Quilts. Today I’m sharing my version of Angela’s amazing Paint Drips quilt from her book A Quilter’s Mixology.

At 84 inches by 94 inches, the Paint Drips pattern as written is a perfect bed size. And as a bonus, the big quilt would go together quickly. From a few curved pieces, you could very quickly make a large quilt. So it’s a great pattern if you just want a small taste of curved piecing and a big quilt.

I decided to make a smaller, throw sized quilt (mine finishes at 69” x 73”). After toying with the idea of resizing the templates, I decided to keep it simple by keeping the template sizes the same. Instead, to resize the finished product, I made less “drips” and also made each column shorter. To make a larger version, say for a queen bed, you could easily add more colors.

For my quilt, I removed the 4th and 5th colors. (As shown in the book, I removed the teal and navy colored drips.)  I thought about playing with the arrangements of the paint drips by moving around the columns. But I found Angela’s arrangement to be the best.

If you have never attempted curved pieces before, Angela walks you through her tried and true, one pin, process. Alas, I’m a pinner so I use lots of pins. Which is also fine, just more hmmmm…. pin-ny. Angela also includes several alternate ways to make quarter circle blocks, including my oh-so-pinny version.

As Angela cautions in one of her “Tips”, one thing you want to pay attention to is the direction of the fabric. When making my quilt with Cotton and Steel fabrics (yah!), I paid extra attention to make sure the direction of the fabric in the matchstick and butterfly fabrics went the same direction in the quarter circle blocks and columns.

I love how this quilt came out. It looks like a paint can well loved by happy colors, which could be one of my favorite things. 🙂 For quilting, I think I’ll try some fancy (walking) foot work. First I’ll echo the curved pieces in the drips. For the background I’ll probably try some background filler like pebble or straight lines.

All in all, I found Angela’s book wonderful and full of inspiration. Not only are there innovative quilt patterns using the Drunkard’s Path block, there are 16 patterns. 16 ya’ll! So it’s definitely a worthwhile purchase.