Saturday, April 16, 2011

The 9 by 12 Transformation Challenge

My friend Jo encouraged me to join in on this on-line challenge being run by Leah Day of 365 Days of Free-motion Quilting blog. I think the blog has now been re-named as The Free Motion Quilting Project. The challenge is to make a small quilt (9" by 12") using a minimum of 5 of Leah's designs from the project, using the theme "Transformation".

I chose to use Radio Static, Chain of Pearls, Matrix Flow, Bed of Roses and Bubble Wand. Let me tell you I found it quite a challenge to get that many different designs into such a small space and still have them look recognizable.

I decided to combine the quilting I wanted to use with the Darned Quilts technique I learned in Dena Crain's class at Wellington Symposium.
These are the fabrics I chose:
I curvy strip pieced them:
Then I quilted the whole piece:
This is what the back looks like so you can see clearly the quilting designs I used:
Closeups of the back:
In the first from the bottom up I have used  Bubble Wand, a square meander, Matrix Flow, a mini Greek key and Radio Static
This next one shows, from bottom up, Bed of Roses, Chain of Pearls and some straight lines:
Continuing from the bottom up I then used a flower motif that was printed on the fabric, a leaf design I made up myself and I finished with Matrix at the top:

Here are some closeups of the front:
This section has Chain of Pearls, Bed of Roses and Radio Static
This has Matrix and the leaf I designed myself
 These ones are not Leah's designs. The flowers were just outlining the print of the fabric and on the stripe fabric I chose to do straight lines in the opposite direction
And what does the finished quilt look like?

It is called "Changes"