Curlicue Creations: Artsy Fartsy In Love

Disclaimer: The products used in the project were provided to me by Island Batik and their industry partners at no cost to me.

This is my completed Island Batik Ambassador challenge project for July, the Love quilt.

This challenge highlights Island Batik's industry partner, Aurifil Thread. Our challenge was to create something "artsy" using at least three different weights of Aurifil thread. I'm not sure how "artsy" my project is, but I really enjoyed playing with my thread.

These are the different Aurifil threads I ended up using on my project. I used cotton 12wt, cotton 28wt, cotton 40wt, and cotton 50wt,

The first thing I did was a tiny buttonhole stitch around all of my patches in cotton 50wt. I was inspired to try the tiny buttonhole stitch by a quilt I viewed at the North Carolina Museum of History's QuiltSpeak exhibit. You can read more about the exhibit here: QuiltSpeak Exhibit

I continued with the 50wt thread to do a little thread painting on the orange petals of the flowers.

Then I switched to this light gray in 40wt to add details to the leaves. I used this fun stitch from my Janome Memory Craft sewing machine on the large tulip leaves and stitched a simple vein down the center of the remaining leaves.

I really enjoy hand stitching, so I drew a grid on the cutouts in the vase and combined these two threads together to get the above look. I used an orange 50wt combined with a gray 12wt for this part of my project.

I knew I was going to use a turquoise blue in 28wt for part of the quilting, so I went out and purchased a black in the same weight. I echo quilted around the applique design and filled in the background with straight lines.

I used the turquoise 28wt to accent the black quilting with a variety of fun stitches on my sewing machine. I've been adding machine embroidery stitches to my quilting in a few projects recently. It adds a nice touch and invites the viewer to take a closer look.

I tried Hobbs 80/20 Black batting on this project. I've never used a black batt before. It did a lovely job at keeping my black background deep and dark.

I backed my project with this beautiful golden Island Batik fabric.

I used two different blue fabrics for the binding. They blend nicely together and accent the blue stitching and blue inner border strip of fabric outlining the block.

I cut the blue block border strip with the 1-1/2" strip die for my Accuquilt Go cutter. It's my favorite way to cut strips. They always come out straight, and cut so quickly.