What signifies the quilt-making season more than fall? To me, autumn is a magical time of the year. I can sense myself unwinding from the highs of summer, ready to hunker down and take both a physical and mental break. I simply want to slip into a cozy sweater, sew, whip up some delicious soup, and settle in with Gilmore Girls.

Whether you are a fan of Halloween or not, this October quilt color palette captures the moody essence of the month without being overly "in-your-face Halloween." When I create holiday-inspired quilts, I prefer them to transcend the holiday and still serve as a successful color scheme. Instead of using bright, obvious oranges and purples, I've opted for a combination of muted or "off tones" to achieve a dark, autumn-inspired quilt.

Purple and orange are both tertiary colors on the color wheel, meaning they are created by mixing two different primary colors (orange = red/yellow and purple = blue/red). They are positioned opposite each other on the color wheel and are considered complementary colors. Complementary colors can often create a somewhat jarring combination, but by incorporating various tones, shades, and neutrals, you can craft a beautiful color palette.

Our October Toad-Spo Intertwined quilt was made entirely of Art Gallery Fabrics print and solid fabrics! On the top, we went with Pure Solids and tried to use as many of the newest Signature Pure Solids designed by Suzy Quilts as possible. This collection of solids feels so “fall” to me and makes for a super impactful quilt! The colors we went with are Truffle, Vanilla Custard, Pampas, Gingerbread, Chocolate, Velvet, Thistle, Haze, and Monet. If you'd like to make this quilt on your own, you can buy the quilt kit here!

You’ll notice that the quilt design separates the required colors into 2 groups or color families. Our October Toad-Spo fabrics can be simplified into orange (Colors 1-4) and purple (Colors 5-8) color families. Within the color families, the fabrics gradient from dark and saturated to light and bright. My favorite way to plug these colors into the quilt is to swap the direction of the gradient within the color families! If you look at the orange blocks, you’ll see that the darkest and most saturated tone, Chocolate, is on the outer edge of the blocks. Alternatively, the darkest, most saturated tone within the purple color family is on the inside. While this is not a required method of pulling fabric for this quilt pattern, it’s one of my favorite ways of playing with the colors!

There are so many ways to customize and make Intertwined unique! But some of those layout options involve cutting up big blocks into smaller pieces. And I know this can be a little scary - who wants to accidentally ruin perfectly good blocks with a cutting error! You can always opt out of this part and sew your full blocks together if you’d like. The full block and the quarter blocks are both so cute so you really can’t go wrong in any decision you make! You might even opt for using the blocks as decoration like the pictures below.

Intertwined is such a great beginner-friendly quilt pattern that shows a modern take on what I’m calling the “courthouse steps meets log cabin” design. The dark Truffle background fabric makes these fall-inspired colors pop! When we saw this quilt being sewn up, our jaws were on the floor. It exceeded our expectations 100x over and is so much better than we could have ever imagined!

Since the theme of this quilt is basically laid back and old-school campgrounds, we knew we had to pick a pantograph that gave the same overall feel. We toyed around with the idea of having a mountain-esque feel to it - think triangles and diamonds. While it might have made a really good pairing with this quilt, we ended up choosing this swirly echoing pantograph called Retro Wall. After seeing it stitched into the quilt, we knew we made the right call. It turned out so so good!!