Lowell Quilt Festival - BMQG Exhibit

Next month, at the Lowell Quilt Festival, the Boston Modern Quilt Guild will host a special exhibit at the Appleton Mills.  If you're in the area, come on by!  There will be some great quilts on display. 

QuiltCon Challenge Block

As I sit around waiting for my thread to arrive in the mail to finish quilting my Dazzling Diamond quilt, I managed to whip up another quilt block to submit for the QuiltCon block challenge.  I still love this block, even after making it again.

Maybe if I have some extra time before the deadline I'll throw together another block that's more improv. 

Dazzling Quilting

I'm in the middle of quilting my Dazzling Diamond mini quilt and I thought I'd share my progress. 

Wait, you mean you can't really tell what I've done from this picture?  Okay, let me show you more details.

First, I stitched in the ditch around all of the grey stars and I echo quilted in the stars three times. I wanted to treat the grey stars as one piece rather than calling out the light and the dark separately. 

After that I did some pebble quilting in the green and I have to tell you, I really like how it's coming out so far.  After I quilted an entire quilt using pebble quilting (something I will NEVER do again) I vowed not to do pebble quilting for a while.  With just this small amount of pebble quilting I went through one and a half bobbins of green thread for this mini quilt.  Yikes!

Doesn't it look awesome from the back?  I always match my bobbin thread to my top thread, so this back, despite being a solid grey, will be mighty colorful once quilted. 

Now for my orange and blue thread to arrive so that I can finish it.  Maybe I'll make one of these blocks for the QuiltCon challenge or figure out what my backing will be for the octagonal quilt.  That's next on my to-do list - quilt it.  Time's ticking away until the show.  EEK!

Octagonal Orb Top Finished

Last night I put the final stitch on my Octagonal Orb quilt top.  It just might be one of my all time favorite quilts.  I feel like claiming A favorite quilt is like picking a favorite child, so I'll just say it's one of my favorites. 

Can you blame me for loving this quilt so much?  I had the hardest time getting the colors right in the pictures.  The teal in the middle left is darker than it appears and the aqua in the upper right is also darker.

I will say, it was pretty hard to get all of the blocks to be the same size.  With all of the pieces and the angle of each triangle to form the orb, things shifted quite a bit.  I ended up doing what the pattern said and focused on making each block square rather than all of the blocks the same size.  As a result, the sashing doesn't quite line up, but because it's all the same color, it's hard to tell.  It's going to require some heavy quilting to mask it.

Now to finish the quilting before the Quilt Festival in August.  I'm still crossing my fingers.  I know I'm going to have to head on another business trip this month, so its crunch time. 

BMQG Mini Quilt Challenge - Dazzling Diamonds

The Boston Modern Quilt Guild is having a mini quilt challenge for its members to create mini quilts, no more than 24" on any side, in the colors of QuiltCon, the inaugural conference and show for The Modern Quilt Guild.  The quilts will be displayed at our special exhibit at the Lowell Quilt Festival this year.  I designed a 6" quilt block for my quilt and made a mini quilt that measures 24" square for the challenge that I call Dazzling Diamonds.

Of course it's paper pieced, my favorite quilting technique.  I wanted to do something with diamonds on the diagonal, but I also wanted something more than just diamonds.  I love stars as well, so I thought about incorporating some sort of star into the block as well.  I determined that if I made the diamond fat, a nice star was formed when you put multiple blocks together.  I thought a giant diamond with a star in between would be boring, so I framed the diamond and added yet another star point to the block.  Voila, you have the block that you see above and below.

Here is the finished quilt top.  I really love how this turned out.  The colors in the above photo are the closest to what they really are. I'm not a huge fan of orange, but used in the right way, I don't mind it.  In this quilt, I actually really like it. 

I love the idea of a pattern creating a secondary pattern.  In this instance, you have the diamonds that form the diagonal lines, the Orange stars, and the grey stars are formed when you put multiple blocks together.  In my quilt you also have the darker grey that forms a pinwheel.

In this mockup, I used one color for the background, which really makes the background stars pop.  I also turned the four center points around to create a medallion effect.

And in this mockup, I rotated the blocks so that the points of the stars inside the diamonds all pointed towards the corner instead of creating stars.  You lose the background star with this layout, but you get this really cool visual effect where you eye is automatically drawn to the center of the quilt.  As you can see, just playing with color and the layout of the block can really give it a different feel.

I'm off to go make another one of these blocks so that I can send it in for the QuiltCon block challenge.

I created a pattern for this quilt block and mini quilt which you can purchase on Craftsy.