Habitat J quilt

At the June meeting of the East Bay Modern Quilt guild we received fabric for a new quilt challenge. Free Spirit generously gave us each several fat quarters from the Earth colorway of Jay McCarroll's Habitat fabric line. The only rule was that we could add our own solid fabrics, but non-Habitat prints were verboten.

On his blog the other day Jay encouraged craven flattery (not his term), so I took that and ran with it. The result is my J quilt.

I was struck by two things in the fabric line. First, there is a crazy mix of colors. I latched onto the contrast between the pastels and more saturated colors, evident especially in the floral dot. Secondly I was surprised by how the most angular print in the collection seemed the most organic, reminding me most vividly of living plants, palm fronds and leaf veins. 

I chose my solid colors from the floral dot print. The pastel background colors became the stripes of the J. I cut solids matching the saturated dots into fractured blocks with the Habitat prints.

The quilt is pieced in three sections: the two improvised block sections and the precise stripes. Measuring, cutting and pinning those curves was nerve wracking, but it all came out right.

I quilted with a few straight lines in royal and white on the J, then a loopy triangle meander for the rest of the quilt. I like the loopy triangles with the fractured patchwork, and especially that angular print.

I pieced the back from various solid scraps, and the tiny bit of extra fractured patchwork from the top. If you squint you can see another J. The binding is more scrappy solids. The quilt is 60" x 74" unwashed.

Update:
The Habitat J quilt was featured on Modern Day Quilts. Thanks Heather!

Update 2: This baby finally got a name: "In One Way"

Burning bobbins

I started quilting the Checkers quilt yesterday. I'm doing a square-ish loop pattern with a bit of a retro 50's feel. I've been meaning to do something like this since I saw Meagan's quilt last year. More recently, my friend Stacey at Peppermint Pinwheels rocked a right-angle meander on her split-log cabin.

This is probably the densest quilting I've done, and boy does it use up a lot of thread. I've lost count of how many bobbins I've emptied, and I'm only about one-third done with the twin-sized blanket.

And now, back to the machine for more quilting on this foggy Saturday morning.

Dialing up the FMQ

Finishing up a whole-cloth stencil quilt, I've decided to push myself on free-motion quilting.

The stencil is a ginkgo twig, very similar to the design on the back of my marquee quilt. The back fabric  is a Michael Miller green and yellow print.

If ginkgo leaves grew on vines (which they don't), they'd look exactly like this. I swear.

The top fabric is an Indian woodblock print. I'm binding the quilt now -- more photos when it comes out of the dryer.