Tuesday, November 15, 2016

STAGGERED COINS...improve and color

A wonderful repeat customer of mine recently ordered a custom quilt as a gift.  She traditionally picks one fabric, a Batik, and then turns me loose.  This time, the gift was a housewarming thank you for a relative in England moving into her new home.  Mid Century Modern, minimalist, neutral.  She picked a gorgeous neutral Batik with quiet pops of bright sea colors, green and teal and blue.  Perfect to add a stack of coins in solids and use the Batik as the primary focus.



I decided to improv the stack of coins and stagger them in organized chaos.  I took a strip of solid and a strip of Batik and sewed them into a tube.  Then I cut each tube into even strips about 3 inches wide but width of tube.  Then I laid them out to sort a good balance of color for the stack.  In the photo below, the tubes are already assembled and cut to width.  The under side of each strip is a strip of Batik with a seam on each short side.


And then, I turned the tube over and cut each Batik side apart at varying places so that when assembled, the solid area would never line up.




You can see the coins being pressed and that each outer edge has a different length of Batik to stagger the stack.




Then, I added large sections of Batik to each side.  And on to my favorite part, the long arm quilting.  The request was to have the fabric and the quilting be the stars of this quilt, so large areas of Batik were dedicated to swirls and pebbles in order to add texture and detail.  The light tan fabric in the coins is used as the backing, so every stitch shows up on the reverse side on a nice solid blank canvas in contrast to the busy Batik front.





I originally planed a feather for the staggered coin stack, but when I got there I loved the idea of each solid strip getting its own special design so I could show off a whole bunch of different stitches.





So the finished product was a quick to piece color study, that was especially fun to quilt and added subtle pop to a neutral room with great success.  

Starting with one fabric and limiting your palette keeps things simple while with big impact in texture.

Let's get quilting...what colors next??