Play Ball - Island Batik 3D Challenge

The December 2019 Island Batik challenge was to bring 3D into the project by any method of your choice, any size. Here is my Geometric Ball With Stars, a foundation paper pieced pattern designed by Quilt Art Design.

This challenge will be my last as an Island Batik ambassador. I have very much enjoyed my two years as an ambassador with all the fun projects we have been doing. I have learned a lot, and challenged myself several times. I decided not to reapply for 2020, I want to focus on my own projects for the coming years.

Thanks to Island Batik for all the wonderful fabrics I was able to play with, Aurifil for the great thread, Hobbs Batting for wonderful batting, and last but not least AccuQuilt for their awesome fabric cutter.

Several ideas popped into my head when I saw the 3D assignment in the beginning of this year, but when this pattern became available in September I knew I just had to make it.

Foundation paper piecing has become a favorite of mine, and I just love to see all the pieces come together to form the final product. This specific pattern really spoke out to me, and I knew I had the perfect fabric for it.

The blues are all leftovers from the London Calling collection from 2018. The different shades of the stars give life and depth to the ball. The white and grey solid batiks together with an intermediate neutral are perfect for creating an optical illusion of a round ball that you can almost pick up from the salmon colored background.

I knew that one layer of batting was not enough for me for this project, I had to add an extra layer. The bottom layer was Hobbs Heirloom Cotton Batting with Scrim, and on top I put Hobbs Tuscany 100% Wool. That gave an extra loft to the ball. My goal was to quilt a dense design in the salmon colored background, to make the ball really pop out.

I used the walking foot to quilt around the white and gray squares of the ball, using Aurifil 40wt Dove #2600. I wanted to let the squares shine as they were, with no extra quilting to flatten them.

In the picture above the stars are not quilted yet, but I decided to add hand quilting 12wt in Teal #2815 in all the stars.

The background was quilted by free motion in a dense geometrical pattern with Aurifil 28wt in Antique Rose #2430.

The quilt is 20" square, and I added hanging corners on the back. The backing fabric is a neutral batik that shows off the quilting in a nice way, both the one by hand and machine.

Aurifil 50wt White #2024 was used for piecing the quilt, and in the bobbin for all the quilting. One of the darker blues from the London Calling collection was used for the binding.

This concludes my two years as an Ambassador for Island Batik. I have had a great time and thanks for the opportunity!