Websterquilt: Cotton and Bourbon

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.