Luxe Rebellion

Every year, Michael Miller and The Modern Quilt Guild get together and issue a challenge in advance of QuiltCon. Usually it involves a fabric line and a few stipulations. This year the challenge was to use the new Luxe Wide Back fabric by Michael Miller. We had to use at least one print from the collection along with the solids, and, if needed, one Cotton Couture Solid.

I admin, when I got the fabric, I was rather stumped. That is, until I realized that the blue print would be the perfect fabric to fussy cut and use in a pattern I had recently designed. You see, I'm constantly designing quilt patters, and most of them rarely make it to the fabric stage. This one was sitting in a binder, and when I saw the fabrics, I had to make it.

Introducing Luxe Rebellion! (Quilt on the left, the original challenge fabric on the right.)

I designed this quilt when I was playing with different ways to manipulate a hexagon. What started as playing with a partial hexagon triangle pieced turned into a much longer, more narrow block after quite a bit of manipulated. Sometimes playing with and tweaking a design can yield cool results. I originally envisioned this quilt in greens, browns and yellows and called it Turtle Power after seeing a Ninja Turtle commercial, but that just didn't seem right after making this. With the edgy look and the rebellious way I used the print fabric, Luxe Rebellion just seemed like the right name.

You can really see how I fussy cut the fabric in the photo above! I admit, I found this fabric a bit challenging to work with. The weave was interesting and I probably should have given it a heavy starch before working with it, as I found the fabric frayed easily. If using this fabric in the future, I'd definitely recommend starching it to avoid some of the frustrations I had. 

I knew I didn't have time for a custom quilt job on this given the tight deadline for QuiltCon, so I did an all over crosshatch. I quilted lines 1/4" apart followed by an inch apart, repeating that pattern. I loaded the quilt on my longarm at a slight angle to give the quilting a little more interest.

I'm also pleased to say that this quilt was juried into QuiltCon along with my Quilters DNA quilt. So if you happen to be in Savannah in February, make sure to check it out.

If interested, you can download the pattern on Craftsy. I'm really interested in seeing how this pattern would look in different color combinations, so do share if you make a Luxe Rebellion quilt.

Fabric: Michael Miller Luxe
Thread: Pieced with Aurifil #2024 50 wt. Quilted with So Fine #50
Batting: Two layers of Quilters Dream Cotton Select
Finished Size: 35" x 48"

Quilters DNA

It's no secret that I love designing quilt patterns and I especially love paper piecing. If I can't paper piece it, I better really love the pattern or design in order to make the quilt. Often I start designing my patterns by doodling on a piece of paper and move to the computer to see how it would look as a real quilt. That's how this quilt came about. I just started sketching and throwing lines on a piece of paper and fell in love. Introducing Quilters DNA!

I love this quilt. The colors, the jewel tones, are so me. Teal is my absolute favorite color. Add some purples, lime and orange and this quilt just screams me. The geometric design and paper pieced elements also scream me. Combined, I'm pretty sure this quilt is a depiction of my own, personal DNA.

It took me a while to figure out how to quilt this. I did some "point-to-point" style quilting in the "DNA Strands" to keep things simple. I didn't want to overwhelm the design. For the vanilla background, I emphasizing the diamond shape inside the strands while adding a ton of straight lines in the background.

And while it was next to impossible to photograph, I did extend the orange strands into the background, adding a fun quilting motif to break up the negative space. I love this design feature and think it gives this quilt just a little something extra that it needs.

If interested, I created a pattern for this and posted it in my Craftsy shop. Check it out today!

Fabric: Michael Miller Cotton Couture
Thread: Pieced using Aurifil #50 2024. Quilted using So Fine! #50 505
Batting: Quilters Dream Cotton Select
Finished Size: 68.5" x 62"

Picchu Boo

Almost a year ago I took a trip of a lifetime to Peru to celebrate graduating from graduate school. One of the most memorable parts of the trip was when I visited Machu Picchu. I took thousands of photos during the ten day trip, but this photo was one of my favorites.

I knew it had to be turned into a quilt, so when we announced the solids challenge in the Boston Modern Quilt Guild, I decided this was my opportunity to make this into a quilt.

Not wanting to do an exact interpretation or make an art quilt, I started cutting a ton of 1" strips out of five different brown fabrics and sewed them together. I ended up making three different groups of these brown strips, one with the strips horizontal, one vertical and one on the diagonal. I varied the width and length of all three as part of my interpretation of the photo.

I decided on a teal background instead of a more natural green that's found in nature. Again, this was my way of modernizing the quilt and avoid looking too much like an art quilt. When it came time to quilt it, I knew I wanted to quilt straight lines opposite the direction of the brown strips. It took me a little while to settle on echoing the brown sections, which ended up giving the quilt a 3-D look.

I used an Art Gallery print from my stash on the backing that I thought went well with the top. I quilted it using gold and teal Aurifil threads. The batting is Quilters Dream Cotton Select. The solids are Michael Miller Cotton Couture.

Overall, I'm pleased with this quilt and it will definitely remind me of my trip to Peru every time I look at it.

Every Which Way

I love a good challenge to push me beyond my comfort zone as a way to try new things. Sometimes I'm less than enthusiastic about a challenge, but I forge ahead anyway as a way to try something new and maybe experiment with something I otherwise wouldn't have. That way, if it doesn't come out the way I want, I can just blame the challenge. 

I loved attending the inaugural QuiltCon in Austin a few years back and I was super bummed that I had class the weekend of QuiltCon this year. That's why when I knew I could attend QuiltCon Pasadena in 2016, I booked immediately. I've been lucky enough to have quilts hanging in both shows to date, but with school, I haven't exactly had as much time to quilt these past few years. That meant I had a lack of quilts to submit to QuiltCon. That in and of itself was enough motivation to enter the Michael Miller QuiltCon challenge this year. 

I will admit, at first the metallic dot fabrics did absolutely nothing for me. I've never really been one to use fabric with dots or metallics, so combining them wasn't exactly motivating for me. At the same time, I had been toying with the idea of framing up flying geese blocks and combining them in some way. 

Originally I thought about stacking the geese at the bottom of the quilt and arranging them in various heights. Because I made as many geese as I could with the fat eighths provided, I had a ton of geese that allowed me to play with different layouts. One night as I was getting ready for bed, about two nights after I finished all of the geese, which are paper pieced of course, I thought about doing a design where the geese were in the center of the quilt and they radiated out from the center. After playing around a little, this design is what I came up with. 

I love Cotton Couture solids, so it was a pleasure working with them with this quilt. I pulled a mint solid from my stash that I have been obsessed over to use as the background. Since I was going out of my comfort zone, I figured I'd pull a different color palette for me. I pulled some solids including mango, periwinkle, watermelon and apricot to go with the mint. Normally I wouldn't pair these colors together, but hey, this is a challenge after all. 

And of course, because I can't do anything easy, I decided to matchstick quilt this bad boy ONE WEEK before the deadline to submit this to QuiltCon. Smart, huh? Fortunately my guide locks came in for my longarm and I was able to matchstick quilt this using a light green thread, which matched the mint fabric better than the mint thread I had (go figure). I quilted it in one day during a marathon seven hour quilting session while watching some football. Let's just say my back was killing me after I was done, but many it was so worth it. 

I bound it with the same mint solid fabric because I wanted the flying geese to be the focal point. I didn't want the binding to be distracting. 

One of the things I love about this quilt and the quilting on it is how the matchstick quilting toned down the harshness of the black fabric and really helped blend it all together. I'm really happy with how this quilt came out and while I'm excited to do more matchstick quilting in the future with my new channel locks, I'm not about to do a marathon quilting session again any time soon. 

Quilt Stats:

Size: 50" x 50"

Fabrics: Michael Miller Glitz and Cotton Couture

Thread: Pieced with Aurifil 50wt 2024 and quilted with Super Threads So Fine! 50wt Barely Green (9 bobbin's worth!)

Batting: Quilter's Dream Orient

Milky Way Quilt

Several months ago the folks over at Michael Miller reached out to me and asked me to help participate in a 100 Quilt Block project in conjunction with Janome. The block needed to be six inches square and use the provided Cotton Couture solids from Michael Miller. I'm a huge fan of Cotton Couture, as I find the hand feel of those solids the best in the industry (along with Art Gallery's solids). So of course, I set to work designing a fun paper pieced block.

I had fun making this block and decided to make a larger quilt out of it. I took the remaining solids that were in the bundle Michael Miller provided and enlarged the block to 12" square and made the following quilt with it. (Excuse the less than stellar photos, with it getting dark so early these days, it's hard to get a good photo right now.)

This was the first time I used a cream-colored binding to blend in with the vanilla background I used to offset the four quilt blocks. I'm slightly worried that it will get dirty easier, but I'm willing to take that chance.

Here's a closeup of the quilting. I used an Auriful 50 weight thread in Chalk (#2026) to quilt this on my domestic machine. I did most of the quilting on an diagonal parallel to one of the star points, but changing direction about three quarters of the way through to add some dimension and twist to the quilting.

To download the pattern for free and see the rest of the blocks, visit the Janome site.

This quilt measures 30" square, so I'm entering it into the small quilt category in the Blogger's Quilt Festival. 

Spin Art

About a year and a half ago I designed this fun paper pieced quilt that some of you might have seen hanging in the Michael Miller booth at QuiltCon and Quilt Market earlier this year. I was obsessed with the color coral when I made this quilt and just had to incorporate the two shades of coral and soft blue into a quilt. I might have to make another quilt using coral and mint sometime soon, my new favorite color to pair with coral. 

This quilt is made using Michael Miller Cotton Couture solids, my favorite solids to work with. I just find their hand-feel to be so soft and a pleasure to work with. This quilt uses the colors Clementine, Peach, Vanilla and Powder Blue. The clementine color has to be one of my favorites still that Michael Miller puts out. That's saying a lot given that my least favorite color of all time is orange (followed closely by brown). 

I quilted it on my HandiQuilter longer using SoFine #50 thread. It's been so long since I quilted it, but I'm pretty sure I used #402, a soft white. 

The free pattern for this quilt will be posted to the Michael Miller website soon. And of course, it's paper pieced for easy assembly! 

Baby Geese Quilt

I feel like the past month and a half has been uber productive for me, for no other reason other than I finished not only a divided basket, but this baby quilt. 

Yes, this is my Michael Miller challenge quilt, which doubles as a baby quilt for my cousin's new son. When I got the fabrics earlier this year, I thought they'd make for a fun baby quilt. I was right. 

I had to rush to finish this one though. I had the binding half hand sewn to the the back, when I got a text from my cousin on November 26th - his son was born a couple of weeks early. So I got to work that day, finishing sewing the binding and washing the quilt so that I could gift them this new quilt on Thanksgiving the next morning. 

I just did some simple straight line quilting, which always seems to take longer than planned. Why do I always pick things that take a lot of time? Who knows? But I love the effect. As I was part way through quilting, I was worried that they quilt would be too stiff with all of the quilting, but fortunately it wasn't. The backing is something I picked up at Marden's during retreat a few years ago. I forget what it is. I quilted this with 50wt Aurifil on my Bernina this time around. 

SewDown ThrowDown

While at SewDown, a bunch of us were looking for something to do during the free sew time. I had come directly from a work trip in Milan, Italy, so I didn't have much room to pack extra fabric/projects. Fortunately, we all received charm packs of Michael Miller Cotton Couture solids in our swag bags. A bunch of people decided to do a challenge to make a quilt using the charm pack - and thus the SewDown ThrowDown was born.

While I think everyone else added additional fabric, I set out to just use the fabrics provided in the charm pack - my own personal challenge within the challenge. I knew my suitcase was nearing the max weight, so adding more fabric might have put me over the limit (I ended up three pounds over and had to do some serious moving of stuff anyway).

I decided to make half square triangles, separating the colors by warm and cool colors. Overall, I think trying to separate the colors that way was okay, but because the charm pack was full of colors that could have gone one way or another - yellow or green, or purple or pink - that the separation of colors wasn't quite what I was hoping for.  That being said, I'm still really pleased with how this quilt turned out.

I backed it using an Art Gallery print that I've had in my stash for a couple of years now. As you can see above, I quilted this quilt, echoing either side of the diagonal lines of the HSTs.

I bound the quilt using Kona Iron.

Quilt Stats:
32" x 28"
Fabric: Michael Miller Cotton Couture Solids, Kona Iron, Art Gallery (I forget the line)
Batting: Warm and Natural
Thread: Aurifil #50 2600

Madrona Road Challenge - Yee Haw

So, you may have already see this over at The Modern Quilt Guild's blog, but my Wonky Road quilt was selected by Michael Miller fabrics to appear in its booth at QuiltCon!  How cool is that? Or should I saw, "Yee Haw" and channel my inner cowgirl since this quilt is about to head to Texas.

This quilt will join my Dazzling Diamonds quilt which will be in the juried show.

If you see me at the QuiltCon, stop me and say hi.  I'd love to meet you.