Last year at the International Quilt festival in Long Beach, I picked up a pack of Hoffman Bali Pops, which are pre-cut 2 1/2 inch wide batik fabric strips cut selvedge to selvedge (Hoffman's answer to Jelly Rolls). You get 40 strips in a pack and they sell in various color schemes. I chose "Strawberry Fields", a combo of intense hues in red, greens and purples, thinking I'd finally make a quilt for my son. The vendor selling the Pops provided a free pattern by Cozy Quilts called"Tradewinds for Bali Pops" (available on Hoffman website). I also bought some neutral background fabric and a nifty ruler that allows you to easily cut the shapes necessary for this quilt. The ruler can be used to make strip quilts as well. The Pops sat inocently in a drawer until May-ish, after I finally completed the wedding quilt I had been laboring over for many months. This seemed such an easy project and came together in a snap after working on a queen-plus sized quilt with a fancy freeform feather design.
Glimpse of backing fabric. I quilted swirls in the borders using a varigated thread in gold, beige brown and black. The backing fabric reminds me of rippling water.
Close up of quilting. I used similar but a slight thinner and lighter thread for the overall meander interspersed with various leaf shapes for the main body of the quilt. This is my first experience working with polyester thread. It definitely gave me pause to use a synthetic thread, but I was won over by the colors seeming so perfect for this project and they had a wonderful shimmer. The thread turned out to be wonderfully easy to work with, with no "pilling" that you often get with cotton or silk fibers.
I threw all caution to the wind by adding the wild red dot outer border fabric:
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2 comments:
this is fabulous and the swirly quilting is amazing...do you do it on your home sewing machine or a longarm?
I use my regular home machine, it's a Babylock - part of their quilting series.
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