A Quilter's Table

Monday, June 9, 2014

Red Hots

I totally expected the Oakshotts coming my way to be beautiful. I mean, I had heard others describe them and seen photos of their projects, but oh my! To experience them in person, I was stunned by their luminescence. I seriously just stared at the stack for a few days before I could even consider what to do with them.

Of course, I knew a mini quilt was the goal, as I was participating in the Oakshott Ruby Mini Quilt Challenge hosted by Sew Mama Sew. And it didn't take me long to know I wanted to use every single one of those luscious colors. Each fat eighth was 9.75" x 23.5", with very enticing names - Madrid, Girnoa, Barcelona, Cordoba, Granada, Valencia, Salamanca, Corunna, Cadiz, Palma, Toledo, Seville, Almeria, Jerez, Santa Cruz, and Santiago - all 100% cotton and each with a red warp.

I took inspiration from Red Pepper Quilts and her tutorial for Cutting and Sewing Free Hand Curves. I loved the vertical curves in her pillow cover and had that in my mind as I began. But I decided I wanted some of my curves to be scrappy, or rather striped, and with my vision set, I cut strips from the longest side of each piece of fabric, 1 1/4" to 2 1/2" wide. I began sewing them first in pairs, offset at one end . . .

Then kept sewing the strips together until I eventually had a large piece that from then on I treated as a piece of fabric all its own.

And from here, the curves began. Working from left to right, I cut curves and added strips, sewing as I went.

Some strips were solid, some striped - whatever hit my fancy in the moment.

I had left the first strip on the left (Toledo) quite wide, and did the same with the red (Santa Cruz) on the right, imagining them in some fashion as borders. And eventually, it was decided to add in the purple (Seville) and orange (Corunna) as top and bottom borders.

And then it was time to quilt! Matchstick quilting was definitely in order in the solid strips!

And I used just about every coordinating thread I had, trying to keep the look of this piece as "hot" as Oakshott advertised.

I debated for a while over what to do in the striped strips, and finally settled on parallel lines with my walking foot, echoing the seam lines of the stripes. At first I wasn't sure about the 'traveling' lines being so obvious, but in the end, I think they added to the overall design.

And lucky for me, I had plenty of the striped 'fabric' left, deciding it would be really fun as binding, extending the vertical stripes all the way to both edges of the quilt.

As it ended up, this binding 'extra' was constructed exactly like my Striped Binding tutorial, and pieced into the solid binding using my Straight Matched Binding technique.