Thursday, June 30, 2016

Modern Batik Challenge - Finished!

I did quite a few hours of machine quilting this week, but I got it done!  I am pretty pleased with how my quilt turned out, and I learned that I should probably do smaller projects for the Island Batik challenges.

 But I had a vision for this quilt and I followed it through to the end, despite a very busy month.  I was inspired by a quilt I saw online when I looked for modern quilts using 10 inch squares.  I had a gorgeous Stack of Florida Oranges in my Ambassador box and the colors were so bold and vibrant I knew they would be perfect for the challenge!  I loaded up EQ7 and went to town designing a quilt using only large half square triangles and squares.  I wanted it to explode out of the center and this is what I came up with:


Sewing the top was easy and fairly painless - I did get my green triangles turned around and had to unpick all 8 of them and sew them correctly, but other than that it was fast and simple sewing.  For the background of this quilt I used Egg White - I love the little dots of color swirling on the light background - it really went well with the vibrant Florida Oranges line!

Then came the quilting, which I really wanted to be special.  I started out with an outline of what I thought would be interesting and progressed through a lot of marking to do the straight line quilting in the center of the diamonds and around the center square - you can see my progress for my first couple of days of quilting in these posts:  Part One and Part Two

When I last blogged I was thinking about what to quilt in the triangles around the blue diamonds.  I found my inspiration the very next morning when I was reading through some blog posts.  Angela Walters blog is one of my favorites, (her machine quilting is amazing!) - and this post about dot to dot quilting gave me the inspiration that I needed to fill in those triangles.

I was thrilled with the results!  My daughter commented on how perfect the lines were, but they aren't - it's just the overall effect that makes them look that way!

I used a light gray Aurifil 50 wt for the quilting.  I like the way it blends into the colors and subtly shows up on the background.  I think it was the perfect choice!

And now for the finished quilt:

Isn't it fun?  I am just thrilled with the results!  I usually like to make more traditional quilts, but I think this quilt is pretty amazing!

It's really heavy - lots of thread went into the quilting, nearly the whole spool!  I used another Island Batik for the binding, from the Lavish collection - it was a nice orange that went well with the rest of my fabrics.  Batiks are nice for mixing and matching between collections!

What do you think?  Did I meet the challenge and come up with a modern quilt made with batiks?   If you would like to see what the other Ambassadors came up with for their modern challenge, there are links to their blogs under the Island Batik Ambassador tab at the top of my blog.

5 comments:

beaquilter said...

that looks awesome! love the quilting on it too.

teachpany said...

Great design and awesome quilting!

Calicojoan said...

I love it! What a happy fun quilt!

Pam Geisel - For Quilts Sake said...

Love the quilting and the fabric works so well in this.

LInda Pearl said...

I love the bright colors, and your quilting is gorgeous!