Note: This post contains affiliate links. I may receive a small commission (at no extra cost to you) if you click a link and make a purchase. I'm back today with a new Fabric Refresh blog post! It's been a couple of months since I've done one of these posts. There hadn't been a new fabric collection that made me want to play with it in EQ8. Okay, that's not completely true. There have been several new collections announced lately that I absolutely love, but they won't be in stores until 2024. I don't feel like I should share mockups with fabrics you can't buy yet. Or maybe I should, so you can preorder your fabrics? Let me know in the comments if you think I should feature future fabric collections in these posts. Anyway, back to today's featured fabric collection. I came across Tula Pink's new collection for FreeSpirit Fabrics called Besties while online fabric shopping last weekend. It's full of bright and cheery colors along with your favorite furry friends and non-furry non-human friends. Dogs, cats, turtles, rabbits, fish, hamsters, plus some great blenders. Tula Pink often has large scale prints in her collections and Besties is no exception. My Stay Square pattern is definitely one of the best of my patterns for allowing large scale prints to shine because you don't have to cut your fabrics into really small pieces. Stay Square is a layer cake friendly pattern but there are also fabric requirements and cutting instructions for fat quarters included in the pattern. I made all of my mockups in this post as if I were using fat quarters, but it does look like layer cakes (and other precuts) are available for Besties if you prefer to go that route. There are not any low volume prints in this collection so you shouldn't have to worry about not having enough pieces in your precut to contrast with your background if you're using white like I did. Sometimes the hardest part of making fabric decisions for a pattern is deciding what fabrics to use for the background, any accent, and binding. For Stay Square, it's usually the accent (the areas that form what looks like a nine-patch) that I have trouble deciding on. The mockup above uses the blue heart blender print from the Besties collection. I also tried out the mint green heart print for a little less contrast and a little more brightness, plus a solid black that really pops! Another pattern that works well with large scale prints is Treasure Hunt. The pieces are a little smaller than Stay Square, but still bigger than might be typical. Especially since I had figured out a way to make these blocks that are much simpler and more streamlined than you might expect! There are 22 prints in the Besties collection so if you grab a fat quarter bundle, you only have to pick two prints to exclude. That's always a bonus when all the prints are great! For the mockup below, I left out the two dog prints because they seemed to be larger scale than the others. That also left 10 prints with animals on them and 10 without. I alternated between animal and non-animal prints for the backgrounds to keep the busier animal prints from clashing where they touch each other. Another fun fat quarter pattern that doesn't have small pieces is Shining Stars. One of the fun things about this pattern is that I generally use white for the accent (instead of the background as I'm more apt to do) so the background can be whatever color you want and changing the background color can completely change the overall look of the quilt. It makes it easier to make it yours! You can use a solid for the background, but I really like using a small scale print to add some extra interest. Besties has a cute small scale heart print in four different colors. I tried out each of them and adjusted the star prints slightly in each to stick with the prints that contrasted with the background the most. Which one is your favorite? Even though Besties does have several large scale prints, that doesn't mean that the collection is off-limits for patterns with smaller pieces. Sometimes the overall look of the collection, the colors, the style can still result in a gorgeous quilt even if you can't necessarily make out the large prints (a full animal, in this case). I mocked up my latest pattern, Wayward in Besties using the fat quarter requirements in the pattern (it's also jelly roll friendly). The variety of bright colors contrasting with a bright white background results in a really pretty quilt even if you can't often see animals (you actually can see quite a few rabbits in the mockup below but that is likely due to the way EQ8 uses the fabric swatches, which are just a small section of the fabric. You probably won't get that same result with real fabric). One last pattern that I mocked up in Besties is Ophelia, another jelly roll friendly pattern that includes fat quarter requirements. I stuck with mostly the smaller scale prints and only included a few animal prints. The first mockup below with the solid white blackground looks great, but since there is a lot of white, I decided to also try using Tula Pink's Fairy Dust print in white. I like that even better! Which background would you choose? That's all for today! Are there other patterns of mine that you would like to see mocked up in Besties? Let me know in the comments below and I may be able to include them in a future Fabric Refresh blog post! Until next time, Amanda