Group Quilt {Pieced Quilt Top}

In April, I shared a grouping of 10 quilt blocks that I shipped off to be considered to be used in a group quilt. As everyone else in the group lives near-ish to one another in South Carolina, they were able to get together in June and July to piece together the quilt top. The fun part is that the quilt has now been shipped back to me and I get the pleasure of quilting and binding it for the finish!

Group Quilt Top

I had no idea what to expect from the piecing, but I have to admit that my first thought was, “that is not anything like what I expected.” Ha! Honestly, that was sort of the reaction everyone in the group had, but I am really excited about all the negative space and the more I look at the design, the more I love what they were able to pull together. The quilt top is approximately 50 1/2″ wide by 51 3/4″ tall.

The other contributing makers are: Cheryl Brickey, Faye Jones, Travis Seward, and Valorie Kasten. The fabrics were provided by Northcott Fabrics and are their Colorworks Premium Solids in lime, marrakech, tangerine, carrot, saffron (dark background), cheese sauce (light background) shortbread, and eggshell.

Block for Label

In addition to lots of fabric scraps, this block was included for me to consider piecing into the backing to use as the quilt label, which I thought was a fabulous idea.

Group Quilt Pieced Backing

It didn’t take me long to create the pieced backing for the quilt using the reserved quilt block.

Quilting in a Small Space

I know I’ve mentioned it several times, but quilting in our small 512-square foot cottage can be a bit challenging when it comes to having space for everything. The photo of the backing might not be the best, but I got the backing made. It’s time to start puzzling together a quilting plan.

Quilting Plan Doodle 2

I had a quick photo of the quilt top that I doodled on prior to receiving the quilt myself. In the original doodle, I considered echoing the pieced vertical “caterpillar” as a mirror image to the right of the straight vertical line, but I didn’t like how that played out. From my initial doodle, there were a few elements that I struck on:

• The dark background will be quilted with organically spaced vertical lines, and
• the light background will be quilted with organically spaced echoing, curved lines.

I also felt like we had leaves that were pointing North, South, and West, so adding in a ghost leaf to point East felt like a good choice.

Quilting Plan Doodle 3

The only change I made between doodle 2 and 3 was to remove the echo quilting on one side of each leaf and consider using a pseudo-Trapunto technique underneath those areas instead. It remains to be seen if I add any of the rounded free-motion quilting motifs to some of the pieced areas or if stitching in the ditch around them feels like enough.

I made these quilting doodles on my iPad using Procreate. I add a layer for each area or style of quilting to make it really easy to toggle off an option and try out something new. Time to get quilting!