Caroline's Sketch #498

Caroline Hadley is an Australian quilter who publishes a weekly feature online in which she shares a digital mockup of a proposed modern quilt design. Her designs are always fun and intriguing, and a design she shared back in January really caught my attention. That was her Sunday Sketch #498, seen here on Instagram or here on her blog.

With Caroline's permission, I decided to make a quilt based on her drawing. I drafted my own templates for the curved shapes, and cut them from acrylic using our library's laser cutter.

I created my own digital mockup to try out different color combinations based on available fabric lines. I settled on Windham's Artisan Cotton, using Raspberry/Light Pink, Light Green/Chartreuse, Dark Navy/Blue, and Poison/Green. Some other options I considered:

The Artisan Cottons are crossweaves which I really enjoy.

I didn't realize until I was leaving the quilt shop with the background fabric and saw it in the sun that the Poison/Green is actually an orange/green crossweave. I might have chosen something different if I had known that, but I think it works ok. It does show up differently depending on the light and the viewing angle; and I didn't attempt to keep all the fabrics oriented in the same way so the color can show differently from piece to piece.

The other fabrics I used do not have as much contrast between the two yarns, so their orientation is not obvious.

Caroline's design is a variation of an Irish Chain. Except for the borders, it simply alternates two blocks. I chose to make the blocks 12.5" finished; the quilt itself is about 62 inches square after quilting and blocking.

I used walking foot quilting through the yellow and magenta pieces. The rest is a combination of free motion and ruler-based quilting.

I filled most of the border with a 0.5" diagonal grid.

I finished the quilt with a facing. The backing is a Heather Givans fabric; it's a paler yellow but it also has bits of magenta and blue.

I appreciate Caroline's allowing me to "borrow" her design. Be sure to check out some of the other designs in her series.

Peachtree Curves

I took this photo of a spiral staircase at the 2023 QuiltCon in Atlanta, at Peachtree Center. I thought it might make a good basis for a quilt. (A 2019 workshop with Michelle Wilkie probably helped plant this idea in my mind.)

It took a while to figure out how to draft the "steps" portion of the design. I finally came up with an approach using Affinity Designer, starting with concentric circles and radial lines. I then applied some distortions to roughly replicate the image.

The finished quilt is 52 inches by 70 inches. I had the pattern pieces printed on large-format newsprint (at PDF Plotting). This one sheet of the pattern is 33 inches by 47 inches:

The "steps" use large-scale paper piecing. The largest curve uses fabric cut to 19 inches by 7.5 inches for each step. I found I got better results using a walking foot with the large paper pieces; otherwise the seams wanted to pucker a bit.

I had a happy accident as I was mocking up various color combinations. I unintentionally filled a set of steps with a gradient, and I thought the result looked pretty cool. This led me to consider Jennifer Sampou's Sky Ombre fabrics for the steps. The remaining fabrics are Essex yarn-dyed linens and Kaffe Fassett shot cottons.

The mix of fabrics, along with the curves and various dense quilting motifs, produced quite a distorted quilt. I had to block it before trimming to square it up, and still had to trim about an inch from the bottom.

For the back, I used a Tim Holtz wideback print I had purchased on sale with no particular project in mind. I finished the edges using a facing, and included the original photo inspiration on the label.