Quilt Invaders in the QuiltCon Magazine!

I am so honoured and pleased to have  a quilt included in the QuiltCon Magazine 2018!

This is Quilt Invaders, probably one of the most minimalist quilts I’ve made.

This is the second time one of my quilts has appeared in the QuiltCon magazine, Mid Century Modern was in the 2016 magazine.

The magazine is available to buy now from here.  Those of you lucky enough to be attending QuiltCon this year can purchase one there (not me unfortunately!). I will get a paper copy in the mail soon but I couldn’t wait for that so I downloaded a digital copy!

And was surprised to see myself appearing on one of the first pages, in this candid shot taken in Chawne Kimber’s class at QuiltCon last year!

 

There are 10 quilt patterns in this year’s magazine from some fantastic designers.  That fabulous hot pink and orange cover quilt is by Silvia Sutters.

I started this quilt back in the Autumn using all Kona Solids. I used my Sizzix machine with their Drunkard’s Path dies for the curved piecing. Part of the left overs from the dies are these leaf shapes, which I like to save for applique.

I have to thank one of my students, Mags, for the original idea for the block (I often blatantly steal my students best ideas!).  In my Mystery quilt class one of the blocks has HSTs around the edge to make a ‘saw tooth’ border.  During the ‘design your own block’ part of the course (also known as ‘Jo’s run out of ideas’!), Mags paired the HST borders with a circle of DPs that we’d used in another block.

It made for a very striking effect and by playing around with the direction of the spikes and by putting the block on point I came up with this motif.

I used EQ7 to help me plan the layout, and to make it more modern I ‘erased’ some of the blocks to give more negative space.  With the motifs lined up and seemingly floating near the top of the design they started to remind me of Space Invaders, (from the 80’s arcade video game I used to play in the back of our local chip shop!), hence the title of the quilt.

Despite vowing never to do a circular quilting pattern again (after the terrible time I had quilting my Off-Centre Medallion Quilt), I decided to use concentric circles but much further apart then before.

I used Aurifil 50wt for the machine quilting and I left some of the circles empty and then hand quilted them afterwards using Aurifil 12wt threads in colours to match the Kona Solids.

I do find the circular quilting really hard and it is quite wonky in places. But I like the overall effect.

I used a scrappy binding in the same solids to finish.

One of the best thing about having a quilt in the magazine is that it gets an automatic entry to the QuiltCon exhibition! So this will be the one quilt I have hanging at QuiltCon this year.