Rusty Tiles

This is Rusty Tiles, my entry for the 2026 QuiltCon Windham Artisan Cotton Fabric Challenge. It features laser-cut fusible raw-edge reverse appliqué (that's a mouthful!).

 

The design was inspired by exterior artwork at a restaurant in the Nashville area. (This is what inspired the name Rusty Tiles too.) I'd been wanting to find a design to take advantage of laser cutting for fabric, and this was just the spark I needed.

The idea for the design came first. Then I considered it might work well with cross-weave fabrics. This brought to mind the Windham Artisan Cottons, and I remembered the Modern Quilt Guild's challenge. This is the first time I've participated in one of the fabric challenges; the inspiration just happened to line up with the opportunity.

The challenge was to use at least 3 of 6 chosen fabrics, with no other fabrics used on the front of the quilt. The fabrics are all Windham Artisan Cottons, and the colors were chosen by Hillary Goodwin (photo from the MQG):

I was initially concerned that this design might want to be two colors only, but I mocked up several variations using three or four of the challenge fabrics and found multiple colorizations I liked. Most of the variations used the same front fabric throughout, but I settled on this one because the few yellow blocks seemed to produce a 3D effect.

I used straight-line quilting in various thread colors, spacing the lines at 6 per inch.

I faced the edges, using Audrey Esarey's tutorial.

Here's a view of the back:

I used the laser cutter at our local library to cut the designs. Before ordering fabric, I did a trial run at the library using some scraps. The process went surprisingly smoothly, but I realized my original plan for a quilt with 9 rows and 7 columns would require a lot of time at the library -- and I could only reserve two hours at a time. As a result, I scaled the plan back to a 5x5 quilt. I was able to do all the cutting for these 25 blocks in two 2-hour sessions.

The blocks finish at 8 inches. I might could have gone as large as 9 inches using the library's Glowforge, but no larger.

I designed the appliqué using Affinity Designer. The designs each fill a 7-inch square. Here's an example of one of my design files, configured to cut two blocks from one piece of fabric (based on the size of the cutting bed of the laser machine). The black lines are the first cutting pass, and the green lines are the second cut.  The pink line is for reference only, to help with lining up the laser.

To prepare the fabric for laser cutting, I used a 9" x 20" rectangle of fabric and pressed 7.5" squares of fusible to the back, spacing them consistently to line up with the cutting file.

I used a light table and a 7.5" square of template plastic to mark the locations of the fusible from the front. This also helped to line up the laser so that the design is cut roughly in the center of the fusible.

By cutting the 8.5" outline of the block with the laser too, the design is perfectly centered in the block from the front, even if the fusible is not perfectly centered.

(Note the slight diagonal cut in the lower right corner. This helped me keep a consistent orientation of the cross-weave fabrics as I was piecing the blocks together. I actually rotated one of the designs by 90 degrees so there is a slight color variation between blocks depending on the lighting.) 

With the assistance of the makerspace librarians, we configured the laser to cut completely through the fabric but only partially through the paper backing of the fusible. This helped to easily separate the pieces later, at home, without having all those tiny bits fall into the laser machine or be scattered about the library's space.

Separating the backing paper from such intricate designs was not as challenging as I feared, but it did take some care.

I cut the bottom layer for the appliqué as 7.75" squares. This is larger than the fusible area, but small enough to not get caught in the seams of the 8.5" blocks. I made sure to cover the fusible entirely before pressing the bottom fabric into place. There were a few blocks where the bottom fabric ended up within 1/4" of the edge, but I was able to trim that back since the fusible did not extend that far.

Here's a view of the seams as I first started piecing blocks together:

And here's the back of the completed top:

Here are some of the other color options I considered:

Unfortunately my quilt did not get accepted for QuiltCon. But that does allow it to hang at our local show, the Heritage Quilters of Huntsville's Fanfare, which is the same weekend as QuiltCon this time around.

To Catch a Thief

I've long been attracted to William Morris fabrics, but the colors don't tend to be a good fit for my usual quilts. So when I saw the Kaffe x Morris & Co fabric collection, of William Morris designs re-colored in a Kaffe Fassett palette, I wanted to find some way to make use of them.

I thought I might try some variation of a wagon wheel design, with a variety of Kaffe's woven stripes as possible sashing. An online image search of wagon wheel quilts produced a range of options, but one quilt in particular drew my eye. This was the Lossie Lane quilt in the collection of the Royal Alberta Museum. I liked the relatively small number of blades in each fan (particularly for these large-scale prints), and the alternating backgrounds.

I drafted a fan block with five blades, and made it as large as I felt was practical (it finishes at 10 inches). Then I set out to make three digital mockups, one without sashing, one with sashing between the "wagon wheels," and one with the sashing going through the center of the wagon wheels. After completing the second mockup, though, I knew that was the version I wanted to make and didn't even bother with the third.

I made acrylic templates using the laser cutter at our library's makerspace. I used paper piecing for the most of the curved fan sections, but there were a couple blocks where I used the acrylic template so that I could do some fussy cutting. Either method came together easily.

The border is fussy cut and uses width-of-fabric cuts. I had to piece these cuts together to get the length I needed, and to match the pattern at the seams I lost almost a full repeat. I used four yards of this particular fabric for the border and a bit of piecing.

I used a solid aqua for the back. I rarely use solids for a quilt back, but they can really show off the quilting.

I recently put together a presentation for our local guild on the topic of quilt labels, and created a slide show of label images submitted by guild members. I was impressed by the creativity of these labels, and was inspired to add a little extra embellishment to the label for this quilt.

I'm considering writing up a pattern for this design. Let me know if you are interested.

Festive Feathered Forest

Before we were married, my wife purchased a flannel Christmas quilt at a shop in Franklin, TN. This quilt is no longer in our possession, but here's an old photo showing it in the background:

For some time I've thought about making a similar quilt. I even once suggested to Robert Kaufman that they produce a set of Mammoth flannel plaids in Christmas colors. When I saw the Warp + Weft Holiday Yarn Dyes from Modern Quilt Studio, I thought I'd give this quilt a try with those fabrics.

I drafted my own design for the trees, based on a feathered star approach. The "branches" and "stars" are paper pieced; the body of the trees and the large red triangles are cut using a single acrylic template which I made using our library's laser cutter.

I learned I should make a test block or two before committing a design to acrylic. There are a couple of small adjustments I wish I could have made to the template.

I used 8 green fabrics; with 53 trees, I was able to make each tree unique with regards to the fabric pairings.

Most of these fabrics had a minimum purchase of one yard each, which is quite a bit more than I needed. I used leftover fabric to piece the back.

The border seemed a bit wonky from the start. I quilted it with a feather motif, which made it even more wonky.

I could tell this quilt would need to be blocked. I normally block after binding, but this one was so out of shape I blocked it first. I used a laser square to help guide my pinning, and straightened the inner border first.

Here's the finished border:

And finally, here's the label:

Wale of a Quilt

I visited Gee's Bend in 2022 for their inaugural Airing of the Quilts Festival. There, I learned about the history of the area's sewing cooperative which contracted with Sears Roebuck to produce corduroy pillow covers -- and how the women were allowed to take scraps of the corduroy home, which naturally ended up in quilts.

I saw several of the corduroy quilts on display during my visit, and I really liked the hefty look of them.

One particular corduroy quilt, made by Mary Lee Bendolph, really caught my eye. This quilt consisted of nothing more than vertical bars of various 1970s colors. Somehow I neglected to get a photo, but I believe that's it in Kelly Spell's Instagram post from the day (see images 1 and 6 in Kelly's post). Kelly also has a great closeup of a different corduroy quilt.

I saw lots of 9-patch blocks in various quilts on that day too.

Inspired by all this, I decided to create a corduroy quilt combining vertical bars and 9-patches.  This is Wale of a Quilt:

I also decided to play with the directionality of the corduroy fabrics. Rotating pieces by 90° gives a different look, depending on the lighting, due to the wale. The fabric has a nap too, so that rotating it by 180° can give a different look as well. The "ghost" 9-patch units in the center are created using these different rotations.

In another nod to the Gee's Bend quilts, I did not attempt to make accurate cuts; in my mind it's "intentionally imperfect."

I'm not sure how machine quilting would look on a corduroy quilt, and it seemed inappropriate for a Gee's Bend-inspired quilt anyway -- so I took a class on hand quilting with Jen Kingwell at the 2024 QuiltCon, with this quilt specifically in mind. I used several colors of 8wt Wonderfil thread in an oversized Baptist fan design. (8wt was Jen's suggestion; I had initially purchased even more colors of 12wt Aurifil.) For marking, I used a strip of template plastic with holes punched every half inch up to 18 inches to act as a beam compass.

The corduroy fabrics are from Robert Kaufman; some are 8 wale and some are 14 wale. I really like the wider 8 wale, but there are more colors available at 14 wale.

I used a Cherrywood fabric in teal for the binding.

The back is a Mammoth flannel plaid. This is a heavy, warm, and cozy quilt.

Here's a look at the label:

The Airing of the Quilts Festival in Gee's Bend is now an annual event. I highly encourage a visit sometime!

Will It Go Round

Back in the fall of 2023, I took a week-long class taught by Barbara Black. The class was built around Wendy Williams's pattern called Full Circle, a design which intentionally incorporates multiple techniques. While I rarely make quilts from patterns, I felt this class would introduce me to some new techniques and at the same time allow me to experience Barbara's excellent teaching.

For my fabric selections, I started with Giucy Giuce's original Deco Glo collection and added texty low-volume fabrics, some coordinating Essex linen yarn dyes, and a couple of busy neutrals for the background. A few of the blocks are scrappy as well.

In class, we focused on only one quadrant of the quilt. Even so, I didn't get very far. This was my status at the end of the week:

(Barbara wrote about our class here.)

After the class was finished, I set aside the project for a while to work on a few other quilts. By this past fall I was ready to focus on completing this quilt.

I wasn't happy with my original fabric choices for the "spikes" (the larger triangles) -- there wasn't enough contrast between the yellow and the natural linen. A month or so after the class, the Deco Glo II collection became available, and I chose an orange from that collection to pair with the yellow instead.

My past experience with appliqué has been almost exclusively fused and raw edge.  For this quilt I used several approaches to turned-edge appliqué, including Karen Buckley's Perfect Circles and needle-turned reverse appliqué. I used both machine stitching and hand stitching, depending on the block. The blue half-circles here are stitched by machine, while the black-and-white circles are appliquéd by hand.

The purple arches in three of the four quadrants are done with hand-stitched reverse appliqué. (In class, for the first quadrant, we appliquéd the purple shapes onto the background using a freezer paper template to prepare the fabric pieces; I then stitched those down by machine.)

I'm not big on embroidery either. For the Flower Garden blocks, I tried to do a little more than the pattern called for, but I know other folks would be much more elaborate.

After taking my photos, I saw that my blanket stitches, used on a few flowers, did not hold up well in the wash.

I used some 100wt thread in matching colors to tack the stitches back in place.

I used Latifa Saafir's chunky binding tutorial to do a 3/4" binding, and used a different color binding for each quadrant.

For the back, I used another texty print. This print would have matched the linen print that I rejected from the large triangles. The custom label is from Spoonflower.

I spent practically all of January 2025 doing the quilting. I'll close with more close-up images.