Wave Gap

Well I wasn't sure if I was going to manage an entry for the current Curated Quilts' mini quilt challenge, but space opened up, I had an idea, and I was able to make it happen. The palette - soft lime green, indigo, grape, lotus pink, teal, and aqua - I totally pulled from stash. That was the easy part. It seems lately, there are two separate prompts for the mini challenge, in addition to the palette. This time the overall theme of the issue is Negative Space. But then 'gap' was an additional object of inspiration, so I kept both of those things in mind as I created my mini.

As I often do when I create a mini quilt of a specific size - in this case between 10" and 16" square - I create a square outline on my design wall with masking tape, so I have a rough idea of the space I need to fill. Note that the square was 16" this time, and my mini finished at 13.5" square, so it truly is just a rough estimate, knowing that seam allowances and design decisions will affect the result.

So I began by creating rectangles in three of the palette colors and arranging them with gaps between them and a much larger gap between the groupings. True confession, I had originally intended to quilt some 'ghost' rectangle blocks, but somewhere along the line I forgot about those! Oh well...

But I still had two colors to incorporate in the piecing, and I did that by inserting a skinny aqua line up top, and an even skinnier pink one below. By that time my piece wasn't quite up to size widthwise, so I decided to create another 'gap' by bordering the focal design with side borders. And then it was time for quilting!

I used two coordinating threads, Aurifil 50wt variegated #3320 [Spring Green] and #2784 [Dark Navy]. With the green, I created a 'wave' in the gap between the top and bottom element, and that was really some fun quilting. I'd spent a few minutes gently drawing with my hera marker, until I came up with outer limits for the wave that appealed to me. Then I got to work filling in, basically using my own Organic Straight-Line Quilting method, roughly following and keeping within the boundaries of the wave. It was at this point that I was really happy for the dark blue side borders, as they helped show off the wave in a way that wouldn't have been shown otherwise.

Above and below the wave, I basically did matchstick quilting. Not a huge fan of burying threads, I stopped stitching just shy of the wave, stitched just one stitch over, and then back... over and over again. It definitely created some pretty nice texture.

I'd found a fun stashed print for the backing, and once the quilt was trimmed, I finished it off with a faced binding. 

So this isn't exactly where I expected to end up, but I'm happy enough with it. The time spent working on it was creative joy - especially the quilting for a change - and I'm good with that!