Island Batik Ambassadors Its All Up To You Challenge

This month the Island Batik Ambassadors were challenged to make anything we wanted!  I have an overflowing scrap bin which made me decide on a scrap quilt.  Oddly enough even after this project I still have an overflowing scrap bin.  It seems to be a constant problem! 

One of the things I love about this quilt is that it uses over 250 different scraps and all are Island Batiks!  It was fun to relive some of the previous collections I've worked with.  And I only accidentally repeated a fabric in 2 spots.  

I started the journey of this quilt when I fell in love with this pattern by Kaye England.  It's called Amber Waves of Grain.  It has these cute teeny tiny stars in it and I love the block.  However, upon further examination I realized that I couldn't cut those teeny tiny stars with my Accuquilt GO! and I really didn't want to cut them by hand.  So I decided on a simple square instead of a star.  Every single piece is 1 1/2" wide by some length.  It was a lot of cutting and would never have been made without my Accuquilt GO!

Some of the blocks I was able to construct as a whole (here they are) and others were partials.  This lead to a real challenge because I had to lay it out one row at a time as I was stitching.  This lead to it being on the cutting table for a while!  But it also encouraged me to get it done so I could get it off the cutting table!  I of course sewed it with my favorite Aurifil thread and Schmetz Microtex needles.  

Here are the first few rows put together.  It's a large quilt!

Ta da!  All done.  This is one HEAVY quilt with all the seam allowances in there.  Each strip is only 1" wide finished so there is a lot of seam allowance.  But I love how it turned out and my Oliso iron helped get it really flat!  It's so cheerful.  My husband says it looks like a candy shop.  I'll take that as a complement.  I didn't want to work this behemoth under my sit down longarm, so I had my mom quilt it using our favorite Hobbs 80/20 cotton/poly batting.

I hope you get to quilt today!

Suzy