Modern Batik Challenge!

This month's Island Batik Challenge is to create a modern quilt!  Modern quilts incorporate the use of bold colors and prints, high contrast and graphic areas of solid color, improvisational piecing, minimalism, expansive negative space, and/or alternate grid work.  You can read more about the Modern Quilt movement and the Modern Quilt Guild page here. The fabrics featured in this post were given to me by Island Batik.

This quilt was made from one of the 5" rolls and a lot of neutral background.  I have been so stressed out about moving that I couldn't really concentrate on following patterns or doing anything methodically.  Perfect time to do some improvisational work.  I took my first 5" strip and cut it in half.  I then added sides to the strip to create a large triangle.

Next up was a slice and dice situation.  I cut the triangle up in lots of uneven strips.  I mixed up the order and sewed a background piece in between each one to complete my first row.

Later, I decided I wanted to play with spacing of color and made a strip of background and blue, alternating the widths.

I decided that with the negative space as the background, I tapered the end to be like a triangle, similar to what I did with the first strip I made.  I also conveniently forgot to take a photo of that step.

I subsequently made two more strips, this time making the stripes running the length of the strip.  I used those to lay out my idea for the final quilt.

I decided to put the intersection point off-center with all four strips being towards the top of the quilt.  Up to this point, I had done zero math! It's kind of freeing just to sit down and sew without thinking.  The math came in handy calculating the negative space that I needed.  Ultimately I ended up with my edge not 100% aligned, but I figured I'd square up the quilt after the quilting was completed!  (I'm seriously letting go of my type A tendencies on this one!)

I decided to quilt this with straight-line concentric rectangles.  I started off-center inside the center background rectangle and continued to spiral out to the ends of the quilt.

Here's the full finished quilt!  I'm normally a modern traditionalist, so this is about as modern as I can get!

What do you think of my Modern quilt?  It was pretty freeing to end up with a quilt approximately 43" by 56" (?).  I'm actually not 100% sure since I didn't really measure it when it was done, and I didn't use much math for any of the calculations!

If you're interested in what the other Island Batik Ambassadors are making, you can check out their blogs. There are 45 ambassadors this year! Be sure to follow Island Batik on Facebook and Instagram to see the projects we all make too!

Join me again on Friday for Friday Foto Fun and on Sunday for the #365DayOfArtPBQChallenge! Link up and share your progress on your own projects!

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