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I initially bought this yard and a half of fabric about ten years ago, figuring that it would be fun to quilt as a wholecloth quilt and thinking I would do that on my domestic machine, an early 80's Viking 6690. Fast forward to when I got my new longarm setup, an Innova M20. I had rented time on a longarm prior to purchasing my own machine, but I still seemed to be a little bit intimidated and I was struggling with which quilt top to load onto the machine.

Then I ran across this fabric, reminded of my plan to quilt it as a wholecloth quilt. This seemed like less of a risk, less chance of messing up a pieced top. I loaded it on the machine and got to work.

I'm most excited about using my longarm for hand-guided free motion quilting. I chose not to get a computer for the machine. I loved the variety of designs in this print and enjoyed playing with different motifs for different sections of the design. I especially liked the two different border designs. I loaded the fabric onto my longarm so I could quilt across a whole border in my first pass.

It is not without a few thread problems on the back, but I'm overall very happy with how it came out. I enjoyed trying a variety of quilting motifs. Here you can really see the texture of the quilting on the back (green) and all those asterisk shapes along the edge were on the second border (see the front of the quilt top in the bottom of that image).

I chose Kona Hibiscus solid for the binding. I used the selvage edge of the quilt top to guild my color choice for the binding.

It is machine bound (see my tutorial for how I do it!) and topstitched with Aurifil 50wt Very Dark Eggplant (#1240).

Not the best photo. (I swear it's a rectangle!) My finished quilt is about 40" x 52". It's one of five quilts I'll have on display in the San Mateo County Fair exhibitions hall this month.

Check out my other finish from May. (It's going to the fair too.)

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To kick off year six of Quilts Unscripted Bee, Emily asked us for 6" x 12" blocks inspired by rays of sunshine and colors reminiscent of a spring bouquet - pink, orange, yellow, with small amounts of lime or sky blue in medium and light colors.

This was such a happy palette to work with. She invited us to work in some improv piecing within our rays. I had really enjoyed piecing improv wedges for the start of my round robin quilt and the center of one of these previous bee blocks, so I set off to make improv wedges with in deep pink and orange.

That wedge unit went into this block.

One of my favorite feature elements is the 1/8" finished pieced strip, so I decided to work one into my second block, coupled with wedges going two different directions.

Here's the full view of my two 6" x 12" blocks. This is going to be such a happy quilt. I look forward to seeing it all put together. Have fun, Emily!

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The San Mateo County Fair (June 5-14 this year) has a large quilt display within the Home Arts Maker Department division in the exhibition hall. I've enjoyed going to the fair in past years to walk through the entire exhibition hall. This year I'll have five quilts on display at the fair. This is one of them. Silicon Valley Modern Quilt Guild (which I joined last Fall) has two challenge categories at the fair under the Quilt Challenge Groups division. The Let's Meet Our Panel challenge asked us to use a panel. I've had students use improv work from class to create a quilt featuring a panel (like the one by Carol O. in this post) and have wanted to make one myself for some time. Since I didn't have a panel on hand, Rochelle from my guild shared this Monsters Inc. panel with me.

I started out by choosing solids from the five main characters on the panel. I did pretty well finding the coordinating colors in my solids drawer. On the left: Free Spirit Berry, unidentified light blue, unidentified olive green. On the top: Kona Jamaica, Kona Violet, Kona Cactus. On the right: Kona Oasis, Kona Peony, Kona Denim. On the bottom: unidentified pale blue, Kona Tomato, Kona Corsage.

Initially I thought I'd have each side be the colors of one of the characters, but there are five monsters (initially the Yeti blended in to the background to me) so I decided to mix up the colors to create the palettes for each side. For each side I chose a general geometric idea or starting point and started cutting fabric. With most of my improv work I don't know exactly how things will end up. This was no exception. Once I created the strip set and cross cut into pieces for the bottom side, I auditioned to decide if I wanted to insert strips of Corsage or not.

As I finished the improv sections, I added them to my design wall. As I tell students in class, I don't care about the messy edges until those edges are going to be sewn to something else. So you can see on my design wall that while the piecing is done, I haven't yet trimmed the borders to size. I'd been thinking about improv sections that would finish approximately 5" wide and I work oversized so I can trim down to my desired finished size.

From the beginning I figured I would miter the corners on my border. I creased the panel on the diagonal so I could use that as my guide. I figured I would just puzzle it out, but didn't have time to be wrong and need to redo things, so I found this tutorial to watch about the process of mitering corners. Thankfully the process went pretty smoothly. I trimmed both edges of the top border before attaching it, but then decided to trim only the inner edge of the other sides and wait until after quilting to trim the whole quilt to size.

Two down, two to go...

Using the diagonal creases through the center panel as my guide I did walking foot quilting in a 2" grid on the diagonal. My first line of quilting was 1" to the side of the creased diagonal. Then I used the guide with my walking foot to space the rows of stitching two inches apart. I quilted with 50wt Aurifil Dove (#2600), a light neutral that I thought would blend in well with all the colors.

The finished quilt is approximately 27" x 27". I machine bound with a medium grey solid after trimming the quilt. (This was the last photo I took, but I was able to steam out my diagonal creases before dropping it off to the fair.)