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.