Saturday, March 7, 2009

Urban Couture quilt





I finally finished (well, not finally, it didn't really take me that long) a quilt using the Urban Couture jelly rolls I picked up at Beverly's. These are designed by BasicGrey and is produced by Moda. I also used a brown and red Fairy Frost prints (Michael Miller) as accent fabrics and backing. In addition, I used a solid lavender dupioni silk, which I pleated in two strips as a dimensional accent, and a gold cotton/silk blend (I believe by Robert Kaufmann) for the outer border. I used brown Moda bias binding (which I actually buy by the roll now) to complete the quilt.
The pattern is my own. Basically, I assembled the Jelly Roll into strips of five strata, and then cut them into large right triangles. I then sewed those into squares, using Fairy Frost and an extra BasicGrey brown print, and arranged them as I desired.
For quilting, I did straight-line quilting on top of the BasicGrey patterns. Then, I did free-motion quilting throughout all the brown areas, to make the dark areas recede. After adding the binding, I also added some iridescent beads to the centers of each large flower in the brown floral print for added dimension. (I think I'd skip this part, also--too labor intensive, and it doesn't add much to the overall look of the quilt.)
The quilt is about 70" square, finished. If I were to make this pattern again, I think I'd only sew strips of three to four strips together when making the strata, so the squares didn't end up quite so large. I really love the shine silk gives to quilts, though the dupioni frays like crazy. It helped that I used my serger on the edges.