Last week I finished up my entry for this year’s QuiltCon fabric challenge featuring Me + You Indah Batik fabrics! This was my first time using Me + You fabric, and one of only a few times I have worked with batiks. I really enjoyed the crisp feel of the fabric, although it did make for some challenges getting all the wrinkles out and avoiding puckers on the backing.
I’ve had this design in my files for 3 years now, after first sketching it out as part of the 30 days of quilt design challenge from fall 2016. It changed very, very little between 2016 sketch and 2019 reality! After recreating my sketch in Illustrator, I only made minor tweaks to the proportions so that the strip widths would be some multiple of 1/4″ and thus easy to cut.
(I’ve now used 4 of those 2016 sketches to make actual quilts, and there’s at least 1 more that I hope to tackle soon. Fun!)
The strips were pieced in sections, starting with the chunk on the bottom left. I needed two Y-seams to make it work, but otherwise the piecing was super easy.
I had quite the journey getting this one quilted. My first quilting plan had me turning the quilt very often and sewing perpendicular to the piecing lines. This went awry when I noticed that alternating the direction that I crossed the seams was pulling them in wonky ways and ruining my nice clean piecing lines. So! I went to Plan B.
Plan B started off ok until I noticed after several quilting lines that I was getting a lot of skipped stitches. I rethreaded everything, changed the needle, etc but nothing helped until I finally took a step back and gave my machine a good cleaning. That was the problem — as simple and maddening as a good cleaning!!
But after many starts and stops and ripped out more stitches than I care to remember, I finally was able to finish the quilting and am very pleased with the result — a straight line pattern that echoes some of the lines of the piecing.
I finished it off with a facing. This is the 3rd or 4th quilt I’ve faced, but I’ve used different techniques each time. This time I used this tutorial by Cotton & Bourbon and it worked quite well. Her corners are different than what I’d done and while it’s not quite a neat on the back, it makes a very crisp corner on the front which I love.
As is now tradition, Jose helped me come up with a name for the quilt. I had been using a working title of “Palm Springs” just because of the palm tree print, but wasn’t totally satisfied. He first suggested “Mint Chocolate Chip” based on the color palette, but that didn’t really feel quite right either.
Then he mentioned that it reminded him of the sedimentary rock formations he used to see from the highway between Palmdale and Los Angeles, back when he lived out in the Mojave desert.
Palmdale! The perfect name!
I submitted my QuiltCon entry last week and am hoping Palmdale will be making a trip to Austin early next year. Fingers crossed!
The stats:
- Quilt measures 44″ x 54″.
- Fabrics are the four Me + You Indah Batiks specified by the challenge (Willow, Powder, Sea Breeze, and Chalk) plus a bit of Me + You Indah solid in Zinc (aka white).
- Backing was made from the leftovers from the top.
- Facing (instead of binding) was made from Me + You Indah Batik in Willow (the dark green/teal).
- Machine quilted with a walking foot using Aurifil 50 wt (#2024 White).
p.s. I’m doing a 31 day blogging challenge.
