Curated Quilts is a new quarterly quilt journal, created by Amy Ellis and Christine Ricks, which features beautiful images of modern quilts and articles about artists, their work, and the quilting community. Each issue has a call for mini quilt submissions with a theme and color palette. The theme for issue three is minimal and the palette appealed to me. We were asked to use only a subset of: light grey, leaf green, grey, orchid pink, blue grey, black.
I started by pulling all the solids from my stash that fit these requirements. I didn't have any blue grey and ended up editing out the greys. My mini has Kona Cerise, Peapod, and Black. I brought in the grey with my quilting (Aurifil #2605). I also pieced the entire quilt with black (Aurifil #2692) thread since every seam had black fabric. My mini finished at approximately 13.5" square.
One of my goals for the year is to design with letters of the alphabet. I thought this challenge was the perfect opportunity to choose a letter and use it in my minimal design. I quickly landed on the letter i. Often I piece a quilt top and then I consider quilting option. For this project I considered my plan for quilting from the beginning, choosing to quilt the entire black background with 1/8" matchstick quilting so the vibrant letter i's stand out. This might be the first time I've been set on the quilting motif before taking a single stitch.
I began my quilting by stitching in the ditch on my vertical seams, then used a guide to quilt vertical lines every one inch.
I continued stitching between each line of quilting. This photo shows how I eyeballed the center of each section... those are 1/2 inch sections on the right, 1/4 inch in the middle, and 1/8 inch on the left.
My goal was 1/8 inch spacing. Here's the super closeup. :-)
The tricky part was starting and stopping around the pink and green pieces. Tons of threads to bury! In the end, all that work was totally worth it!
I chose a faced binding so the quilting and the pink pieces would go right to the edge. I use this technique for my faced binding, though I press the folded edge before attaching it to the quilt. ;-)
Thanks for visiting! It's been so fun to see what other have created for this challenge. Check them all out on the CQ call for entries. I've also linked up to Needle and Thread Thursday.
