Curves Ahead

Before I jump into Curves, I feel quite sure many of you will want to read a few more quilt stories in a wonderful blog post by Krista Moser. Last week I shared the stories of a few quilts I saw at a recent show (click here for that post). Afterwards I received an email from Karen linking me to an article entitled “Who’s that Girl” (thanks Karen!). In it Krista has photos of some amazing historical quilts and a bit about their makers. Please click here to read the stories in Krista’s post.

And now watch out, there are

This was the “big” challenge theme in our ThreadBenders group this year, and here are the rules:

“Each participant may use any technique they desire to construct a 36″ x 36″ square quilt with abstract curves and NO straight lines. The quilting may include straight lines, and striped fabrics are ok.

Quilt shouldn’t represent an object or scene – strictly abstract.

Any fabrics/colors may be used. Plus – we will each purchase a yard of the same green fabric. This fabric must be used as a 1/2″ finished binding on the front of the quilt. Some of the lime green fabric must be used in the quilt itself also. The amount is up to the artist.“

We had our big reveal meeting recently and the quilts are delightful! I’m so impressed with this group. We are fairly new and most of those who joined 7 years ago were not even sure if they were art quilters. But, with our big win at AQS Grand Rapids last year, we’ve come a long way – and we’re having fun too!

To visit our site and see all the Curves Ahead quilts please click here.

As usual, I’d like to share my quilt, and the journey it took me on. I started by coming up with a color palette ~ Citrus Splash seemed like a good choice considering the binding had to be lime green. So I dug through my stash for oranges and yellows to join the fun.

Next, I did a web search and found an image that was very curvy, and very joyful. I purchased the rights to use the image as my inspiration, and I was off and running:

I simplified a few of the curves and knew I was going to remove a bunch of circles. Then I had the entire pattern printed out at 36″ x 36″.

As I often do, I chose my repliqué technique to do the hard work. I pinned the white background fabric to the back of my pattern and stitched down the center of a few of the heavy black curves to anchor the background to the pattern. Then I placed the wrong side of the appropriate citrus colored fabric in place on the right side of the background, pinned it in place, and straight stitched along both sides of that black area.

Next I flipped it over and trimmed away the excess fabric.

And satin stitched over the raw edges.

That was fun. But how to make all those circles? I certainly wasn’t going to satin stitch around each one. Time to pull out the Scan and Cut™ and fuse some fabric pieces, wrong sides together. My circles ranged from 3/8″ to 3″, and it was a blast playing with this great tool.

Since the circles were backed, it would be pretty simple to stitch them onto a finished base quilt. So I quilted the whole thing in the background with long curving lines. I like to do what I call “airplane” quilting on these types of lines. Please let me explain. I prefer to do long lines like these with a walking foot and feed dogs. The problem is I tend to want to position my hands close to the needle and try to show the machine how to do it. This seldom works well and puckers are the result. Instead I’ve discovered that if I sit back and grasp the quilt out and to the sides, allowing the feed dogs to do what they’re good at, I get much better results.

Once quilted the required green binding went on.

Now, what design would be best for anchoring all 86 circles in place? I made a small sample and tried out an asterisk, a spiral, and a 5 petaled posey. My granddaughter Hanna said the posey made it look like a citrus fruit cut in half. It was also the most fun to stitch (even the 3/8″ ones), so that design won.

I pinned the circles wherever I felt like it, and finally decided when enough was enough.

Once they were stitched in place ~ the quilt was done!

The entire challenge is a delight for the eyes. If you haven’t visited the ThreadBenders site yet, I’ll repeat the link: click here.

Plus… our curvy quilts will be exhibited at the Crazy Quilters Quilt Guild Show on April 1st & 2nd in Mukwonago, WI. For all the details click here!