Blogger’s Quilt Fest Entry – Color Weaving (Original Design)

Blogger’s Quilt Fesitval – Link to Original Design Category

Twice a year, Amy of Amy’s Creative Side puts on Blogger’s Quilt Fesitval, a wonderful linky event so quilt bloggers can share our quilts and see the work of lots of other talented quilter’s in blogland. I am new to blogging and new to knowing about this festival, so I was enjoying reading about everyone’s amazingly creative and beautiful quilts that have been submitted. It did not even dawn on me that I could enter. Ha! Well, after a super kind suggestion by a fellow blogger (Hillary, thank you so much!), I decided to write up my process for creating my custom design, Color Weaving and submit it to the Original Design Category.

A few weekends ago, I took a sketch book and colored pencils with me on short trip. While sitting in the airport, lounging with family in the living room, and daydreaming, I came up with several new ideas that I am looking forward to exploring in the upcoming weeks. For Color Weaving, as you can see in my sketch below, I was inspired by good old primary color blending, but I kind of got stumped with what to do with the fourth quadrant (lower right hand corner).

Color Weaving – Sketched Idea

Sometimes being stumped just leads to even better ideas! Not knowing what I wanted to do with the primary color blending, I chose to start with a mono-chromatic theme and “mix” a light color with a dark color. I really wanted to use teals for this quilt, but I just could not find the right color shades in my LQS to get the effect I wanted. But I quickly fell in love with the purples that were available, and I am really pleased with how the blending and weaving effect looks like a light watercolor wash over the deep, dark purple:

Color Weaving II – Quilt Top

I have to admit that this is the second version of the quilt that I have made. Color Weaving I was really important as a learning process for me. In particular I learned several things that helped me keep my piecing of Color Weaving II much more acurate:

1. I pieced the quilt in width-wise strips. I did not have issues with the longer blocks (the top, middle, and bottom stripes), but for the smaller strips I struggled with alignment. I found that as I laid out the 2nd quilt top I made sure that each strip’s seams matched up with the strip above and below it and ripped seams to fix areas that were a bit wonky or too big / too small and was much happier.
2. If at all possible, try to do a group of strips at one time. Once I got into a rhythm it was easy to sew consistent seams. When I took a break and came back to work, I lost a bit of consistency and needed to rip more seams to fix.

Color Weaving II – Quilting Detail

Because I was happier with how my piecing lined up, I quilted this quilt with lots of straight line stitching to echo the crisp lines formed by the pattern. And I am super thrilled with how the quilting detail enhances the pattern!

Color Weaving II – Quilting Detail

This morning I took a short walk with the quilt and my camera to a local park and I had fun photographing the quilt in a much different setting. Don’t the lines of a park bench look great with this pattern? Maybe I am just biased. 🙂

Color Weaving II – Completed Quilt

The backing for Color Weaving II is a single print that reads as a solid from a very slight distance. The quilting really makes the backing more interesting than just a plain single backing, though. I keep thinking about cinnamon rolls when I look at the small spirals that are created by the quilting.

Color Weaving II – Backing

The quilt finished out at 36.5″ by 48.5″ and after its first wash is roughly 34″ by 46″ which makes it a very nice sized baby blanket.

Color Weaving II – Detail

Please hop over to the Festival and consider voting for my quilt in the Original Design Quilts category. The entries show up randomly without names or numbers so just scroll through the category to find mine.

Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy the show!