Cycles 2 for the Blogger's Quilt Festival

Let me introduce you to Cycles 2, my entry into the wall hanging quilts category of the Blogger's Quilt Festival.

If you are a new visitor to my blog from the festival, welcome and I hope you will take a minute to look around. Thank you to Amy from Amy's Creative Side for hosting the festival. If you are a more regular visitor here, I apologize because this is a total repost of my ta da post for this quilt, which was just a couple of weeks ago. I just could not resist entering this quilt, as I continue to be totally smitten with it. So thank you for not minding the almost instant replay.

Cycles 2 is the second quilt in what might be a series of Cycles quilts. My first Cycles quilt is here. Cycles 2 is 37.5" x 39" after washing. She is made from Kona solids and Essex linen, there is Kona white on the back and the binding is Essex linen. I hand stitched the binding.



The modern industrial matchstick quilting was done with a variety of variegated threads - for the backgrounds I used golds and browns and for the circles I used a blue variegated thread. The different coloured threads gives a subtle striped effect.



I washed this quilt and the added texture was just enough to really make this quilt shine for me. The quilting is about 10 lines to an inch, give or take, so there is not a lot of fabric to crinkle, but it still did crinkle.



 The colours are taken from the sun drenched, west coast, northern Pacific Ocean beach palette. The texture is meant to evoke weathered, eroded rocks, driftwood, cliffs, shells. I hope you might also think of waves, tides, wind and even rain and ocean storms.



It is also geometric, asymmetrical, uncluttered using simple shapes and loads of negative space - a modern quilt.



You can see the thread colours better on the Kona white back fabric. Cycles 2 is meant to hang on a wall, so the back will be seldom seen.



I wish you could see her up close. It is surprisingly hard to sew the lines unevenly like this and I found myself returning to evenly spaced lines all the time.



A nighttime detail shot shows some of the thread colours better.

Here are some of the threads from an instagram photo. I used all of these and maybe a couple more for the background. The encouragement from the instagrammers to use them all helped make that decision. In fact the encouragement on instagram really helped with all steps of this quilt, thank you instagram friends. 

You can see the texture in the early morning sun. This photo is before washing.



A reminder of what she looked like when I basted her. The change the quilting, binding and washing adds is remarkable. I still love the quilting part of quilting the most, this quilt shows you why.

Let me explain a little about my term industrial modern matchstick quilting. I was inspired to use matchstick quilting by Jacquie Gehring, who blogs at Tall Grass Prairie Studio - her matchstick quilting is very evenly spaced and stunning. My spin on it is to use the wobbly unevenly spaced lines I often use in straight line quilting even in these tight quarters. I am sure others have done this but the term industrial quilting is one I made up to describe these intentionally wobbly lines that create uneven texture. Having made it up does not mean that someone else is not already using it too, so let me know if you have seen it before.



On last shot, in this one she is being held up. I still need to make a hanging sleeve and figure out which wall to hang her on. I already have an idea for another version, there may well be more in the Cycles series.

Quilt Stats:

Name: Cycles 2
Pattern: I made her up myself
Size: 39" x 40"
Fabrics: Kona colours and Essex linen
Festival Category: Wall Hanging Quilts

You have time to enter up to two quilts in the festival if you have not yet done so - go here to see all the categories - and there are some quality hours to be spent pursuing the entries, they are fantastic.

Best,

Leanne