May's Charity Quilt

 Here's a small charity quilt I made from a charm pack I have had for a while. I added some solid squares to make a good sized quilt, and finally added a 5" frame around it. The resulting quilt is approximately 40" x 50", and it gives a summery feeling.

This is my fourth charity quilt for the year, and 33rd all time for the children's ward at the hospital.

Blue Pillows

I took a little break from quilting and made these two pillows for my son's couch. They will brighten up the dark grey fabric on the sofa, but still keep a masculine feel.

The pillow forms are 20", but the fabric is cut smaller to get "stuffy" pillows.

Make It Modern with Hobbs

The May challenge in the Island Batik Ambassador program was to create a modern quilt using any of the provided Hobbs batting. Here's my solution to the challenge.

Must incorporate one of the characteristics of modern quilts as defined by the Modern Quilt Guild (the use of bold colors and prints, high contrast and graphic areas of solid color, improvisational piecing, Minimalism, expansive negative space, alternate grid work)

Note:  All products in this post were given to me by Island Batik as part of their Ambassador program.

When designing a quilt I always sit down with pencil and paper and make a sketch. Sometimes the the sketch is quickly discarded and I start looking for ideas from other designers, but not this time. This is completely my own design!

I decided to make a grid/lattice using grey and black solid batiks, with white solid as background. Batik foundations in cold colors fill in the squares.

My original idea was to use only grey in the vertical lattice, but that didn't give enough contrast, so I added a black stripe to make it more distinct.

I decided to bind the quilt with white solid, adding a light blue strip of Check it Out in the lower right corner for interest.

The quilt is 38" x 54", a good crib size, and fits perfectly in this playground! I like the way the lattice weaves its way on top of the colored squares.

Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 Bleached Cotton Batting was used in the quilt sandwich. The quilt is pieced with Aurifil 50wt white #2024, and quilted with a variety of matching Aurifil 40wt and 50wt threads in an uneven organic grid.

All the previous pictures are somewhat cold, just like the colors of the quilt.
I needed a little more color in the last picture, the green leaves of the birches have not come out as far as they should according to the calendar, we still have frost nights. Maybe that's what I get when making a modern "winter quilt" in May?!