Bloggers Quilt Festival - Block Flower Quilt

If you're visiting for Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival, welcome to my blog! I thought long and hard about which quilts to enter this time around - but ended up choosing my Block Flower quilt as my second entry (in the home machine quilted category).

The design for this quilt was born through a desire to use some of my (significant) stash of large scale prints. I chose a range of warm prints along with a few charcoal greys (from designers Anna Maria Horner, Denyse Schmidt, Violet Craft, Heather Ross and Lotta Jansdotter), and created a simplified bears paw type block to feature these fabrics. This quilt is currently residing on my bed, and it's a lovely reminder of spring as we descend into autumn and winter here in Australia.

The background in each of the blocks is a different light value print, which helps give the blocks a little more depth than using a solid.

The large scale of the blocks also gave me a lot of room to play with the quilting design. Initially I thought I'd do some big feathers in and around the blocks, but once I'd pieced the top I decided something more linear and geometric would suit the quilt top better.

I ended up creating a secondary design around the blocks, using the geometry of the blocks as a jumping board. I marked straight lines using my Hera marker and ruler, and used these as the basis for my quilting.

The sashing within each of the blocks is quilted with a chevron or arrow type of design, echoing the diamond shapes to the sides of each block.

I created a large cross-shaped design in the areas between the blocks on the diagonal, by matchstick quilting large triangles, and filling in the crosses with swirls and pebbles.

I continued the matchstick quilting and swirls/pebbles out into the border as well, using the angles on the blocks to create large triangles.

I love attempting long arm style quilting on my domestic machine, and I had a lot of fun quilting this quilt. It was quite challenging quilting the centre block due to the sheer bulk of the quilt in my machine, but the more I do this type of quilting, the more I get used to manipulating my quilts through my machine.

I quilted this entire quilt using Aurifil 50wt in pale grey (Dove), which is my go-to thread for most of my quilting. It has blended beautifully into all the background fabrics, and just leaves all the texture.

This quilt was recently published in Quilters Companion magazine (issue #67), available now.

Quilt Stats:
Size: 78" square
Fabric: Kona medium grey sashing, along with a variety of low volume and coloured print fabrics.
Quilting: By me on my Bernina 440QE, using Aurifil 50wt cotton Mako thread (Dove grey)
Design: My own design.

Thank you for stopping by, I hope you enjoy the rest of the festival! I'm looking forward to some serious quilty eye candy :o)

xx Jess