I have watched the Curated Quilts mini challenge for several months now and finally decided to throw my hat in the ring for their August challenge — black and white! Entries were required to be square, and could range in size from 10″ x 10″ up to 16″ x 16″. They were to be black and white (or at least read black and white) and display a sense of motion.
I decided to use one of Emma’s drawings as inspiration! She created this at my parents’ house last January after my mom showed her how to use a ruler to draw nice straight lines. I used to make doodles like this myself when I was younger so it was fun to see. The motif always reminds me of a shattered glass window, which fits with the “motion” theme of the challenge — the sudden stopping of motion, that is.
I limited my version to two colors of course, but other than that, the process was pretty similar! I created a square artboard in Illustrator, and then scattered straight lines across it until I had something I liked. I divided it up into sections to make templates for foundation paper piecing and got work. It took more templates than you might think — about 20 in all — but to have fewer templates would have required fewer lines and I didn’t want to scale that back.
Despite the numbers of templates, it came together without too much trouble over the course of 3 evenings. The girls were asleep, and Jose was out of town, so I just plugged along until I was done!
I chose to keep the quilting simple, and stitched in the ditch along each seam line. I submitted it to the challenge about a week before the August 31 deadline, and am waiting to see whether it’s chosen as one of the 25 to be featured in the magazine!
The black and white challenge drew a ton of awesome entries, so the competition will be stiff but whether it’s selected or not, I had fun making it and confirming that I could indeed translate Emma’s art into a quilt! It would be fun to make something in this style on a larger scale sometime soon.
The stats:
- Quilt measures 12″ square.
- Fabric is from my stash. I’m not sure what brand the two solids are, but the prints are older Cotton + Steel plus one Libs Elliot print (the hexie one).
- Binding is solid black.
- Backing is a Boundless fabric print that I had left over from a recent project for Bluprint.
- Machine quilted with a walking foot using Aurifil monofilament on the top and Aurifil 50 wt thread in Dove in the bobbin.
