The Vivian Quilt in Black and White
A few weeks ago, I asked a question on Instagram: What would you like to see for my Vivian Quilt samples? I was already planning to make a scrappy version (I’ll be sharing that one tomorrow), but I was stuck on what else to sew. Several people suggested either a monochromatic quilt or a black and white quilt, so I decided to go that direction and make a black and white Vivian Quilt.
I was especially grateful for that suggestion because one of my goals this year is to sew more from my stash — and I have plenty of black and white prints on hand. I pulled a big stack of fabrics and then spent some time sorting through them to make sure I had a good mix of scale and value. Including a couple of grays along with some very dark blacks helped give the quilt more depth and visual interest.
The final fabric pull included lots of old favorites (hello, OG Cotton + Steel prints) along with a few newer additions. For the background fabric, I used leftovers from several white and gold Speckled widebacks I’ve used over the past few months. I love finding ways to repurpose leftover wideback fabric, especially for backgrounds like this one (you can read more about using leftover wideback as background fabric here).
While this project didn’t exactly make a noticeable dent in my stash, it did feel really good to use what I already had and to revisit prints I’d forgotten about. If you’re thinking about making a Vivian Quilt from your stash, don’t let that idea intimidate you. Patterns like this one — where the feature fabrics don’t touch and are separated by background fabric — are much more forgiving when it comes to mixing prints. If you’re on the fence, I say go for it.
The backing is a Starry wideback, which felt like a perfect fit, and the binding may look like a solid at first glance but is actually Speckled Black Onyx. I kept the quilting simple with straight lines, letting the fabric and layout do most of the work.
Thank you so much to everyone who suggested a black and white quilt. I don't know if this idea would have occured to me on my own, and I absolutely loved how this Vivian Quilt turned out.