Friday, August 12, 2022

Island Batik Ambassador's Marvelous Minis Challenge

This month's Island Batik Ambassador Challenge was to create a miniature quilt!  I love to make minis when I am playing with an idea or want to try a new technique.  

I adore the work of Audrey Esarey of Cotton and Bourbon.  She has a whole series of radial quilts that are just gorgeous.  I've wanted to come up with one of my own for a while and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do it.



I started by drafting a circle in Electric Quilt.  I then played with colors to make it a bit more modern and surprising.  You can see in the picture that for some of the segments I pre-pieced them so they were easier to paper piece.  It worked okay, but I need to figure out how to align them to the paper more precisely next time.  I was also very careful to label each paper with the proper colors so they came out correctly.


Now it was time to quilt!  I marked my straight lines with a white Clover iron off pen and then went digging through my Aurifil thread collection to find the perfect shades.


I wanted to do something a little different in the middle of the circle.  I though about continuing all the lines to that point, but then the quilt tends to get a dimple from all the threads and I didn't want that to happen.  So I picked one color (navy) to continue all the way through and skipped the others.  Instead I added some 1/4 inch lines which I used to guide my stitching.


I ended up deciding to use those quarter inch lines as guides for strings of bubbles instead of quilting them as straight lines.  I like the way it turned out.  I used my favorite Hobbs 80/20 Cotton/Poly batting and Schmetz Microtex Needles to do the quilting.  You can see that the navy line is thicker.  This is because I went over it twice to add emphasis.


Here is my finished 12" mini!  I'm calling it Micro Radial.  It was super fun and I can see myself making more mini radials in the future.

I hope you get to quilt today!

Suzy

Be sure to see what the other Ambassadors are creating this month.

Brenda Alburl ~ Songbird Designs
Megan Best ~ Bestquilter
Pamela Boatright ~ Pamelaquilts
Elizabeth DeCroos ~ Epida Studio
Jennifer Fulton ~ Inquiring Quilter
Preeti Harris ~ Sew Preeti Quilts
Mania Hatziioannidi ~ Mania for quilts
Reed Johnson ~ Blue Bear Quilts
Connie Kauffman ~ Kauffman Designs
Emily Leachman ~ The Darling Dogwood
Denise Looney ~ For The Love Of Geese
Leah Malasky ~ Quilted Delights
Maryellen McAuliffe ~ Mary Mack Made Mine
Anorina Morris – sameliasmum.com
Lisa Pickering ~ Lisa’s Quilting Passion
Claudia Porter ~ Create with Claudia
Gail Renna ~ Quilt Haven Threads
Brianna Roberts ~ Sew Cute And Quirky
Michelle Roberts ~ Creative Blonde
Gail Sheppard ~ Quilting Gail
Andi Stanfield ~ True Blue Quilts
Sandra Starley ~ Textile Time Travels
Jennifer Thomas ~ Curlicue Creations
Suzy Webster ~ Websterquilt