Alpha Quilt

I am woefully behind on sharing quilts and quilt-adjacent things from the last several months and will be playing catch up over the next few weeks. First up, I’m sharing my most recent finish — Alpha! I created this quilt for the QuiltCon 2024 fabric challenge, and was thrilled to receive word last week that it has been juried into February’s show. Woohoo!

This was my 7th QuiltCon fabric challenge design, and six of the seven have been juried into the show. It’s always one of my favorite categories, but that doesn’t mean coming up with a design is easy! I started out in a completely different direction this year and worked through several line and block-based designs, and spent quite a while messing around with a half-square triangle motif. But I just couldn’t land on something I was completely happy with.

So I turned to another favorite — alphabet quilts! I’d been wanting to revisit this genre ever since making Unscripted with my quilt bee a couple years ago. After a couple more days of noodling with ideas, I landed on the design you see on the left below. Each alphabet letter is created only from squares and quarter circles. (H was the most problematic letter, and I still don’t 100% love how it looks slightly different than the other letters, but c’est la vie!)

I settled on this design, and had already nearly completed the quilt top, when I suddenly wondered if adding a border might help. The other two images above are the two border options I considered — one offset, and one evenly spaced around the letters. Obviously I went with the evenly spaced option, and I’m so glad I did! I think it gives the letters a bit of breathing room and nicely frames the design.

I made the top over the course of a week or so in September. In an effort to reduce the number of seam lines, I chose to combine areas of like fabrics where I could. The second row also introduced a challenge since squeezing 6 letters into that row shifted some of the divisions between letters. This led to a few extra fun piecing puzzles, such as my letter O below! I created the outer ring first, then pieced the full circle into it.

With my quilt top complete it was time for quilting! I stitched straight horizontal lines at 1/2″ intervals in a light purple thread — the same thread, in fact, that I originally purchased to use with Game Night, my fabric challenge quilt from two years ago. Neat!

Another nice little tidbit about this quilt is that it turned out to be the last piece I quilted on my HandiQuilter Avante. I bought a new longarm in November — there’s a blog post to come about that too — and sold my Avante to a fellow Houston MQG guild member. Over the last 18 months or so, I struggled quite a bit with thread tension on the Avante, but I was FINALLY able to identify the root cause of that as I geared up for this quilt!

To make a long story short: I had been told by the longarm servicing tech to remove the bobbin case spring when using magnetic prewound bobbins, and I’ve read this same recommendation in many other places as well. Two years later, I concluded that this was poor advice for my particular machine and its unique peculiarities!! My machine was much happier, and fed the bobbin thread much more evenly, if the bobbin case spring remained in place.

Look at that texture! Look at that nice, balanced thread tension! I was SO RELIEVED to finally resolve the thread tension mystery, as it both enabled me to finish this quilt without issue, and then sell the machine without reservation. (And I was able to pass on my lesson learned to the new owner!)

I was so impatient to get photos of this one that I attempted to do them in the middle of the day when my usual garage door location was in sunlight. So I tried hanging my sheet backdrop on a shady area of our backyard fence, and it worked like a charm.

I like showing my full photo set up in hopes that it helps people realize that you don’t need a super fancy setup or equipment to get good quilt photos. My setup for the photo at the top of this post — which is the submission photo I used for QuiltCon — was to hang a white flannel sheet over the fence, pin the quilt to the sheet with a couple safety pins just to keep it from falling into the flower bed, and take photos with my 2.5-year-old iPhone 12 Pro. The photo above is the straight-out-of-the-camera pic, and then I edited the photo to crop and straighten the quilt, then color correct and brighten the image. That’s it!

Can’t wait to see Alpha hanging at QuiltCon in February!

The stats:

• Quilt measures 48″ x 47″.
• Top and binding fabrics are Artisan Cotton by Windham Fabrics in the 6 shades of the QuiltCon 2024 fabric challenge: red/royal, grape/dark pink, apple green/chartreuse, aqua/blue, turquoise/copper, and white/aqua.
• Backing fabric is a blue/pink Katie Kortman fabric.com print that I bought on discount at QuiltCon 2023.
• Batting is Hobbs Heirloom Premium 80/20 cotton/poly.
• Pieced with Aurifil 50 wt thread in #2600 (Dove Gray).
• Quilted on my HQ Avante with Aurifil 50 wt thread in #6733 (Twilight).