This month's Island Batik Challenge is to create a modern quilt with Hobbs batting! 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 and batting featured in this post were given to me by Island Batik and Hobbs Batting.
I have always wanted to do a transparency quilt since I feel like they are all the rage in the modern world. But I wanted to create my own pattern. I actually designed this quilt in Excel with coloring in the different cells and changing the color where the rectangles overlapped. Here's the quilt before I sewed all the pieces together.
The trick on assembly was to figure out how to sew the blocks together and not have any goofy intersections. I was able to do it with only one partial seam! A partial seam is where you sew one part of the seam together so other blocks can be sewn. Then you come back later to finish the rest of the seam. You can read my tutorial here.
I used Hobbs 100% Cotton for batting with Aurifil 50wt in white for quilting and piecing.
Stick to the modern theme, I used my walking foot to quilt straight lines across the quilt. One of the new tools I picked up at Quilt Market, is the Vivilux Green Laser. The original is a red laser, but I wanted to try the green one out. I used it to help keep the spacing the same between the quilted lines since I have trouble with my metal bar that attaches to my walking foot (I'm sure it's user error). The Green shows up surprisingly well on the different colors of fabrics, and it just velcros on the top of my machine.
I'm going to be trying the laser out on other applications, and I'll post a full review at another time.
Here's the full quilt! It finished at 40" square and I really love how it turned out!
Be sure to follow the Island Batik Facebook page to see what the other ambassadors are making this month!
Have you done a transparency quilt before? Did you love it?
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