Island Batik Ambassador's Aurifil Italian Color Builder Challenge

I was so excited to receive the teal 2020 Aurifil Italian Color Builder of Capri, Italy.  These threads are 50 weight cotton and so beautiful.  I immediately hopped on Google and started looking at pictures of Capri.  What really hit me were the gorgeous teal waters and I knew I wanted to incorporate that into my project somehow.

I started by pulling teal Island Batik fabrics from my stash.  I also selected a peach fabric for the background sky with the idea of creating a sunset.

I then started playing with wave formations.  I must have drawn 5-10 different drawings which I was unhappy with.  Finally I decided to simply cut out wave shapes and start layering them.

Final placement of the waves.  Time to fuse!

Since this is an Aurifil challenge I knew I wanted to do a lot of dense quilting.  I picked a different filler pattern for each of the wave fabrics.  I then did some fill quilting in yellow to give the sun a dense yellow color.  Finally I did bands of elongated bars in three different orange and corals to simulate the sunset.  I purposely left a small band between them for added contrast. I used one layer of Hobbs 80/20 Cotton/Poly batting inside my quilt.  I used my favorite Schmetz Microtex Size 80 needles and it went through the layers of fusible quite easily.

I decided to topstitch down the binding in all three teal threads.  However, after breaking a needle on the second outline I decided that two was enough.

I'm really happy with the way the quilt turned out!

I hope you get to quilt today!

Suzy