We've been experiencing wonderful Spring-like weather here in the Midwest and I couldn't resist taking a photo of my Indigo Tiles Quilt outside with some of my wooden birds as props for a seaside vibe or am I channeling a scene from the Alfred Hitchcock's movie "The Birds"?
I made the Indigo Tiles Quilt top back in the summer of 2014 and I used Janet Clare's Hearty Good Wishes, Moda Indigo Collection and other Japanese Indigo prints I had in my stash. I've been wanting to machine quilt this top for so long and thought I was ready to do it last week but somehow at the last minute decided to take a pause. I'm glad I did because originally I had planned to do organic vertical straight line quilting and realized several days ago that my quilting should be horizontal instead and then I was ready.
This is the first quilt that I've done an entire quilt with organic straight lines. I just love how the quilting turned out; the fluid movement of the horizontal organic lines really accentuates the prints from Hearty Good Wishes. Before I started to machine quit, I read two great tutorials on organic straight line quilting:
The key to doing organic straight line quilting is making sure you mark registration lines or have seam lines which can help you guide your stitching so that it ends at the same height as it began. You don't want to create an uphill or downhill movement on one side of your quilt. I used my walking foot, set my stitch length at 5.0 stitch line and used a blue denim variegated thread. Again, I really loved how the quilting turned out and will do it again on the right quilt.
Indigo Tiles measures 48" x 64" and the blocks are 16" finished. I based this block on something I saw on Pinterest which used 2-1/2" strips and thought I could make it using my 4-1/2" x 8-1/2" rectangle die. This is such an easy block made with eight of the same size rectangles. I thought I could find a link for this block but couldn't so I'm providing a hand-drawn diagram to show how simple this block is. This block design can be used for other strip sizes as you can see on the diagram.
When I bought the Hearty Good Wishes and Moda Indigo fabrics back in 2014, I immediately made a bag from Missouri Star Quilt Co.'s pattern The Everything Bag (here) and it's a big bag. I use it to pack the quilts we take on our vacations/road trips and I now have a matching quilt to go with this bag. I can see taking my new combo on vacations to Michigan, the Oregon Coast or anywhere there is a deep blue ocean or lake.
In other sew-doings, I finished #5 Smitten Block this week and ready to start the next set of hexagons which means choosing and preparing fabrics and watching more Gilmore Girls.
I consider myself to be a modern-traditional quilter and like to use my traditional fabrics in a modern setting. Since I've been doing a lot of quilts lately with my modern fabric stash, I thought I should spend some time with my traditional stash by sewing the rest of the blocks I made with my Barbara Brackman fabrics over four years ago. It's one of those projects that I saw a pattern, thought it would use up a lot of the BB stash, cut all the pieces (before I had a die-cutter) and then decided I couldn't bear to sew all those 1" HST and came up with another pattern. BTW, I still have a lot of BB stash. I'm hoping to have a quilt top done this weekend.
The fabric fast continues and the month of February is almost over and I still have not purchased any fabric. I'm really looking forward to receiving my FQS Sew Sampler Box this week.
Minus 100 Yard Challenge YTD Total - 37.875
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