Giant Button Card Quilt!

Today I am revealing a brand new quilt!  This is my Giant Button Card quilt, made for the RJR Fabrics ‘What Shade Are You?’ Blog hop!

Every week RJR Fabrics feature a quilt made by a different quilt blogger using their gorgeous Cotton Supreme Solids.  They approached me earlier in the year and I was very happy to receive this bundle of rainbow solids to play with. These are the colours I chose:

Silver Lining 433 – card
Julep 403 – background
Chalkboard 382 – centre cross
Spring 405
Riviera 274
orange peel 412
chilli pepper 49
Tropicana 339
Melody 371
purple haze 279
lake 427
hydrangea 214
rhododendron 181
goldenrod 92
sprout 249

The idea for this quilt just came to me while staring at a card of shirt buttons.  I love strong graphic shapes and was taken by the idea of a simple cross in the centre of a circle, and I spent a while working out the best way to achieve this with fabric. I loved the idea of using the RJR solids to make a bright rainbow of giant buttons!

This is probably the most modern and minimalist design I have produced so far!

It took a while to decided the layout of the buttons, in the end I organised them in a ‘wash’ that snakes through the rows from top top left to bottom left.

I also tried to enhance this quilt’s modern credentials by off-setting the ‘card’ against the background and leaving plenty of negative space.

This is my entry for the Modern Category of this year’s Festival of Quilts, and has just been sent off with my other entries.

Usually I prefer to FMQ my quilts but as I was trying to be uber minimalistic (for me!) I decided to straight line quilt this one.

I am really not very good at this so I thought I would choose random line spacings to help disguise any inconsistencies.  I’m not sure whether it has worked or not (I can still see them!!) but I do like the texture and appearance. I used a pale aqua Aurifil 50wt  thread that matched the background.  I even blocked this quilt (first time ever) to see if that would help keep it hanging straight at the exhibition, but I am not sure it made any real difference!

I had some lovely square scraps left over from making this quilt, so of course I sewed them  together once piecing was finished, to produce two panels.  Regular readers will already know what happens to these next…

I used that variegated orange Aurifil 50wt to quilt wavy matchstick lines over the panels (with just wadding beneath).

And then the tendrils were added and the panels became one of my Tendril Project Pouches!

How cute is that panda lining fabric?

If you like this pouch then head on over the my Instagram account as I am giving it away!

And not just the pouch, every week the lovely RJR folks giveaway TWO bundles of the fabrics used in that week’s featured quilt, one on their account and one on the guest blogger!

I decided to add the pouch as a second, runner up prize!  Look at that bundle!  What a great giveaway, head over to both accounts now and enter by leaving a comment.

As this is a bit of a special quilt I persuaded my husband (who wears ‘photographer’ as one of his many hats!) to give it a proper photo shoot around Shangri la Farm.

It’s quite a large quilt for one person to hold up (73 x 78 inches), but I had already sewn on the hanging sleeve so we inserted a batten to stabilise it and I stood on a chair in various sites around our field.

I thought you might like to see this shot of me relaxing between takes!  My little hands did sometimes appear over the top of the quilt but luckily we got enough good shots without them!

For the back I chose this text fabric from Word Play by Sarah Fielke for Windham. Unfortunately I didn’t quite have enough fabric to make it work with the text the right way up!

I’ve loved using the Cotton Supreme Solids for this quilt, they are the perfect weight for patchwork and really stable which meant the curved piecing worked like a dream!

I do hope you will check out my quilt if you make it to FOQ in Birmingham next month.  I have 3 other quilts hanging too (traditional, group and two person categories) so you’ll hopefully see at least one of mine!

Don’t forget to head to IG and enter the two giveaways!