All Fired Up - Part One

I am literally all fired up to be an Island Batik Ambassador!  So, it seems fitting that my second quilt for them, a miniature, be called "All Fired Up" after the line of fabrics called Fire Island.

I received all these beautiful black fabrics above.  Black isn't usually my color in my quilts though I do wear a ton of black and white.  I was scrolling through my Facebook feed thinking about what I wanted to do when I saw a picture of a traditional pumpkin seed and/or orange peel quilt.  I knew it would really showcase some of these black fabrics.

However, I can never do anything the easy way, so I had to adapt it somehow and make it my own. So I went into Electric Quilter 7 and started playing.  Here are the four designs I came up with:

I decided on the third idea above because I really liked the circle in the center.  I figured out I needed 40 of the orange peel shapes.  I knew there was no way I was going to be able to draw 40 of those leaf shapes and have them come out symmetrical.  So what did I do?  I called my mom.

My mother is also a quilter and she happens to have an ink-jet printer.  I don't, we have laser.  I knew that I could put my favorite Steam-a-Seam 2 through an ink-jet printer (no laser because they heat it!) and get symmetrical shapes.  I simply cut 1/2" off the 9" inch wide sheet of Steam-a-Seam 2 and it went right through the printer without any troubles!  I will definitely be doing this again.

I knew I also needed a grid on my background fabric to help me align the leaves so I drew one with a white iron-off marker that would come off when I ironed on the pieces.

Once that was done I started putting on the pieces!  It was so much fun.  I knew I needed a little more light to see the white lines on the yellow fabric, so I found a great new use for my LED light box:

 Here is the progression as I added more pieces!

Come back on Wednesday to check out the next step!
Suzy