I made this quilt - Misdirection - to a very tight deadline (I think I had three weeks from finding out it had been accepted and needing to post it), but it was such a fun quilt to make - I really enjoyed focusing on it and getting it finished. I adore the colour combo of navy, green and gold against low volume greys, and it was fun to design a quilt with so much negative space to play with.
This quilt uses half rectangle triangles (HRTs) to create the design. I've become a bit fascinated with HRTs - I love the angles HRTs create, especially long rectangles, and it's a shape I plan on playing with very soon :o) The angles in the design made it pretty easy to choose quilting designs, and to help work out how to break up the negative space.
I used 50wt Aurifil for all the quilting, and matched my thread colours as much as possible to each coloured section. The background is all Dove (which blends freakishly well into all low volume fabrics I've tried it on). I did use my walking foot for all the long straight line quilting - I wanted them to be really straight, and I knew how impossible that would be for lines that long if I tried FMQ. The rest of the quilting is reasonably large (1/2" or so spacing) so although it has lots of quilting, it is still a really snuggly quilt.
To break up the background area, I did mark the some of the long diagonal lines before I started quilting. From there it was simply a matter of quilting each of the sections, alternating my favorite pebble/swirl combo with sections that repeat some of the designs from the coloured sections. I think one of the reasons I love low volume backgrounds so much is that they behave like a solid in terms of showing quilting, but they have a subtle texture as well. Having a pieced background made it really easy to mark the quilt too ;o)
It is so nice to finally be able to share this quilt. I'd love it to be mine, but as soon as I designed it my 7 year old son made it pretty clear he'd love it. So it can join the nest of quilts on his bed for a while :o) I'm hoping I'll start blogging a bit more regularly soon. I have so much I'd like to say about QuiltCon - but in a nutshell, it was about the people. It was amazing to meet so many people I have connected with online, and I was constantly amazed how easy it was to transition from chatting via email to chatting face to face. Thanks to everyone who I was lucky enough to spend time with in Austin, it was an incredible experience, made more so by all the wonderful people I met.
xx Jess
