We’re nearly a month into 2023, and I’ve still got one more 2022 finish to share! I coordinated the Gulf Coast Modern Quilt Guild’s annual community outreach quilt, and it turned out so well — I can’t wait to see it hanging with the other community outreach quilts at QuiltCon!
This year’s challenge theme was “color shift” and we were given two palettes to choose from — “warm” with pinks moving to purples and “cool” with greens moving to blues. We didn’t have any guild members who had the bandwidth this year to create a design from scratch, so I suggested a few of my own existing designs and the guild chose to use my Triangles at Play pattern.
After mocking up the quilt in both colorway, we chose the green/blue option and guild members set to work making half-square triangle blocks in various sizes. Everyone was assigned a general color value from light to medium to dark, and used fabrics from their stash.
I was a little worried that we might not get the color gradient we were looking for with such an open-ended fabric pull — who knows what people have in their stashes, right?? But two things ended up working in our favor, I think. First, the pattern has enough blocks that they blend together well. And second, our guild members went overboard and made SOOO many half-square triangles that we ended up with enough to make an entire other quilt. The excess of blocks made it easy to eliminate any blocks/fabrics that truly didn’t work.
We held a sew day in September and spent so much time doing layout that we only got a few sections sewed together. After that, I took everything home and finished the layout myself. I then carefully packaged everything up, and we had a second sew day to finish the top. With the layout done, that second sewing session only took 1.5 hours!
GCMQG member Katie Welch took the top and did a truly wonderful longarm quilting job! I love the swirling pantograph she chose, and how she echoed the light green-to-dark blue color shift in her thread choice. (It’s surprisingly lovely on the back too!)
Our quilt will benefit the Bay Area Assistance League, an organization that works in our local area to help people and particularly kids in need.
The stats:
- Quilt measures 69″ x 90″
- Pattern: Triangles at Play by Sarah Ruiz
- Pieced by members of the Gulf Coast Modern Quilt Guild
- Longarm quilted by Katie Welch
- Binding by Tina Bass
- Label & hanging sleeve by Sarah Ruiz
Oh wow, the detail of changing the thread color is beautiful. The quilt is stunning and that’s awesome that everyone was so generous with their time and stash that you have enough to make a second quilt.
Great quilt! I like your design & color choices.