Creating a Rainbow Design with Coral Reef

The Coral Reef is a Quiltworx Technique of the Month pattern that is available to customize in the Quilt Planner.

Quiltster allows you to “unlock” the pattern to create a rainbow colorway. This means that you are purposefully breaking up the block groups in order to isolate a single block to color separately from the rest of the group. Doing this allows you to let your creativity flow without being restricted to the original pattern instructions. However, when you do this, Quiltster over estimates the amount of yardage that is required for your project. Continue reading to find out how to go about minimizing excess fabric for rainbow colorways for the Coral Reef.

Judel from Quiltworx says: With Coral Reef, the first step is to study the pattern instructions. The pattern instructions are not available in Quiltster, you would need to have the pattern handy to do this. Decide which Alternative you think will achieve the best approach for you. For Rainbows, a lot of times, it’s Alternative 1. But, depending on what you want to do, it might be others.

Since the alternatives are available in Quiltster, you can either play with Quiltster to figure out which one works best, or you can read the instructions and decide which alternative you want, then choose that when you are building your project.

Here are the steps for how to choose an alternative block in Quiltster:

  • Step 1. Inside the Coral Reef, open one of the preloaded blank Templates (one is a Queen and one is a Wall size).
  • Step 2. Select one of the block groups, and press “Clear”. This removes the existing block design, allowing you to select a new one to take it’s place.
  • Step 3. Click edit to choose an Alternative design to play with, or look at the pattern and see what each alternative represents (this is spelled out in the intro booklet in the table, or within each individual booklet on the first page).
  • Step 4. See which block alternative gives you the least yardage.

You will still have more yardage for Rainbows than others. But, it should cut your 60 yards down to somewhere between 30 and 40 yards, depending on the size and how crazy you got with the colors. If you use the same 8 fabrics throughout the quilt, you can also just ignore the yardage completely, purchase a couple yards of each fabric, then stack them and place all the appropriate templates on each one. None of the rainbow quilts on the cover required over 2 yards for the 8 rainbow fabrics. So, this is a good place to start.

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