Over the last week or two, my family has been playing with a new product from Kits by Carla. It's called Quiltiles. It's both magnetic, and easily portable, so we took it along for our end of the Summer beach trip.
Quiltiles is a magnetic quilt block design tool. As the front of the box states, "It's a tool...It's a game...It's art!"
The first thing you see when you open the box is this colorful instruction sheet. It includes a basic overview of the product, suggestions for two quilty games you can play using Quiltiles, and some info about their growing online community. You can visit and join their Facebook group here: Quiltiles Community.
Under the instruction sheet, you can see the four sheets of magnetic shapes and the design board.
The magnetic shape sheets come in four colors, red, yellow, green, and blue.
The design board has a nice 6 x 6 grid and two diagonal corner to corner guidelines. Of course, you are not limited to the design board either. Because all the pieces are magnetic, you can play with them on refrigerator or other magnetic surface.
Each of the four magnetic shape sheets break up into these pieces. In total, you have 144 pieces to play with! That is a lot of combinations!
Before I had a chance to try it, my 6 year old took over. He loves it.
He used every possible space to create this design. He says it's a block warehouse building.
He made a few other designs, too.
Here are a few of the designs I came up with.
The first design evolved into this one.
Then this...
And finally this! It was fun to play with the shapes, plus it got my creative juices flowing again. Playing with Quiltiles had me thinking in a fresh, new way.
I came up with this modern looking yellow and green arrow design.
I made a little row of cottages by putting the rectangular magnets on top of the square magnets.
Here's a fun, traditional Pinwheel Star block.
The Pinwheel Star block evolved into this Hourglass Star block.
That became this block with the triangular edges. The only thing I didn't like about Quiltiles is the number of small, quarter square triangles. It would have been handy to have a few more of those in each colorway.
I decided to make this fun, half-square triangle design into a real quilt block.
Here's what I ended up with. I changed it from a five color design into a three color design, and sewed half-square triangles from big 5" squares of fabric. The resulting quilt block is 24". I'm not sure if I'm going to sew a few more of these for a quilt top, or just finish it as a small wall hanging. Please leave a comment below with your vote or suggestion.
I used this Moda Bella Solids charm pack for the white squares, and a couple of blues from my stash to sew this. It was so easy with the precuts!
Quiltiles is a terrific way to jump start your creativity! To get yours, visit Kits by Carla here: Quiltiles
Have a super day!
Jennifer S. Thomas
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