Welded Quilt {AGF Stitched}

Over the last couple of weeks I've been working pretty solidly on a new quilt. This is the third installment in the AGF Stitched series, a joint project between The Fat Quarter Shop and Art Gallery Fabrics. This quilt is called Welded, and it is another really fast quilt to put together :o)

As soon as I saw this quilt design, I decided it would be perfect for my eldest son's upcoming eleventh birthday. It's a great masculine design, and it uses large pieces of fabric so there's lots of opportunity to use large scale prints.

I've used fabric from several Art Gallery collections - the background text fabric is one of my all-time favorites (from Cherie designed by Frances Newcombe). The rest of the fabrics are from Utopia (Frances Newcombe), Curiosities (Jeni Baker), Happy Home (Caroline Hulse) and Imprint (Katarina Roccella). I love this mix of prints and colours - and I think my son will love it too :o)

I had originally intended to keep the quilting simple on this quilt (famous last words, right?) - but as you can see that idea went out of the window pretty quickly! I haven't actually finished the quilting yet, but you probably get the idea of where it's going from these photos...

 I started by quilting the background areas using Aurifil 50wt dove grey thread (the magic blending thread!), creating a square 'border' around each of the navy blue squares. It took me a while to decide what to do in the other coloured squares (orange, yellow and green etc), but I eventually decided to quilt a star type design, with pebbles radiating out from the centre of the blocks. I LOVE the texture in these parts of the quilt - although it was that decision that took this from quick and simple quilting, to something that is taking hours. All worth it though, I think!

I'm now in the process of going back and quilting each of the navy blocks, just using simple straight lines in varying widths. I will also quilt the turquoise corner stones at some stage soon. I was a bit worried that all this quilting would detract from the quilt design - but I think because I've used blending thread and kept it to just a few designs (essentially straight lines and pebbles) it works quite well. This is still a really soft and drapey quilt, despite all the quilting - possibly due to the amazing quality of Art Gallery Fabric I think?

If you'd like to make your own Welded quilt, you can find the free pattern here, and there is a video tutorial available too! The Fat Quarter Shop also have a complete quilt kit available, using Pat Bravo's Etno collection.

I hope you have a fantastic weekend! School holidays kick off today for two weeks, so I don't expect to get much sewing done - but I'm really looking forward to having my small people at home :o)

xx Jess