Notes to Self Quilt

Earlier this week I put the final stitches in the binding of my entry for this year’s QuiltCon Fabric Challenge! This mini quilt is called “Notes to Self.” It’s meant to mimic sticky notes and folded paper, and more broadly captures how life often feels like barely organized chaos. As with many of my quilts, I’d been kicking around a rough draft of this design for a couple years and am happy to finally turn it into reality — and I think we can all agree that “organized chaos” feels like a particularly appropriate vibe for 2020.

I have come to look forward to this challenge every year and am happy that the Modern Quilt Guild is hosting it again for 2021, even though QuiltCon will be a virtual show! I signed up early enough to receive a fat eighth of each fabric from the MQG. My friends and I all agreed that the fabrics were definitely challenging this year, but I actually liked the color palette quite a bit!

The first step in creating this quilt was to make foundation paper piecing templates for 7 different folded sticky notes. After printing out three of each, I chose 16 to use in the quilt. For a few of them, I flipped the template over and traced it on the other side in order to make mirror image blocks for additional help with the scattered look.

Piecing the grid of sticky notes was slightly trickier than I expected due to the handful of blocks where a corner of the note protruded into the sashing area. It was a fun puzzle!

With the top finished and a backing pieced from the fabric leftovers, I headed upstairs to my longarm! This is the second quilt I’ve done on my new-to-me machine and it was definitely a learning experience. I did straight line quilting using the plastic channel locks, with the lines spaced 3/8″ apart.

I was very pleased with how straight I was able to keep the quilt top, and LOVE how straight and not-wobbly the quilting lines are thanks to the channel locks. I had some trouble getting the spacing between lines exactly right, and did end up ripping out a couple lines of stitching so I could make a second attempt. (Ripping stitches with the quilt stretched on a frame was different and not the most comfortable thing either.)

I’m also quickly learning why you need oversized backings when you’re on a longarm! I definitely like to have a good 6-8″ of fabric on each side to give myself plenty of buffer, as well as room to test my thread tension on scrap fabric before jumping onto the quilt top itself.

This time, my batting was smaller than my backing, as you can see on the right side in the photo above. I wanted to use up this scrap piece and it worked ok, but I think in the future I will want to make sure the batting is large enough that the side clamps grip that as well.

The stats:

• Quilt measures 21″ square.
• Top and backing fabrics are the 4 specified QuiltCon Fabric Challenge prints plus Kona Cotton solids in White, Ice Peach, Cactus (I think), Ash, and Gotham Gray.
• Binding is Kona Cotton in Gotham Gray.
• Quilted on my longarm with Aurifil 50 wt thread in #2310 (Light Beige).