gypsy wife quilt - liz gellert's tula pink version

i have asked a few gypsy wife veterans to share their completed quilts and some thoughts about making it with us. next up is my dear quilty friend, liz gellert, who used to blog at shush, i'm quilting, but is now mostly found on instagram @lizfromshush. i am quite pleased to share liz's quilt because i take full credit for it's making since i gifted her the pattern without her having expressed any interest in it previously (talk about pressure!) and later suggested that since she was collecting so much tula pink fabric, she should consider making her gypsy wife from that. it appears liz may have had the same idea at the time. with all that tula laying around, it was probably an obvious choice for liz. either way, i still take credit. sure, she did all the piece work and stuff, but i planted the seed.

liz's son finding all the frogs

without further ado, here is liz:

what attracted you to the gypsy wife quilt or why did you make one? Well "someone" (aka you 😆) sent me the pattern as a gift for my 40th. It was right in the middle of the first flush of gypsy wife fever and I loved the look of it. It was a great gift!

how long did it take you to complete? It felt like an eternity at the time! More then a few months but less than a year. I worked on it in fits and starts, as I am inclined to do. But after I finished the top, it sat around for another year before quilting. I had planned to make it bigger but eventually decided smaller and finished was a better option!

how did you go about making fabric selections? Because I love Tula Pink and wanted to use some of the fabric I had been collecting, I decided to make the quilt in one range of her fabrics. I dragged out my Prince Charming and my Birds and the Bees collections and then let my husband choose between the two. Prince Charming it was. I also thought that would make it look quite different from the other GW quilts I was seeing at the time.

what was your favorite block to make or favorite part of the project? Definitely finishing!  I absolutely love the quilt, but I found the similar blocks a bit tedious to make.  However it was an excellent skill builder for me in terms of focusing on accurate block sizes.

the fab backing

what would you change or do differently if you could? I wouldn't change the quilt I made, but if I did another, I would love to do one in soft pretty pastel shades.  I also love the look of the GWs I have seen with strongly coloured blocks and light backgrounds. Very cool!

what advice or tips would you offer for others making this quilt? Just keep going. You will be so very pleased when it's finished. Also spend some time looking through the errata and lists of blocks required per section that other people have put together. It will save a lot of head scratching and agonising trying to figure it out yourself!

Because I used a single fabric range, I made most of the larger blocks in a single colour way (ie blue, green, pink etc) so that each block would have some definition in the completed quilt - rather than mixing the colours up within the blocks. I did then need to try and balance the colours of the blocks across the quilt. I think overall it was worthwhile. This won't be so relevant for scrappier GW quilts, as they naturally will have an interesting colour mix.

Have fun!