Harlequin Sunset

 To clear my backlog - here is one my favourite recent quilts, which has not made it to the blog for some reason yet.

I was very impressed by the possibilities of combining layer cakes with stack-and-whack techniques and thought I'd experiment with that some more. Previously, I had used a similar approach with improvised curve piecing, where each 4-piece stack was cut free hand in its own way, you can check out the Airways quilt and the Splash of Neon one. This time I wanted to cut all the squares in the exact same way to be able to mix all the colours more thoroughly.

I chose 16 squares from a layer cake of Fossil Fern, one of my all-time favourite collections, and cut them using a freezer paper template. Then came the most fun part - mixing and arranging and rearranging again.

Then I stitched them together without worrying much if the corners matched perfectly (they didn't!), but at least the whole thing came together reasonably flat. The blocks had to be trimmed, obviously, so it ended up under a meter, nor big at all.

The colours were gorgeous by themselves, but it still needed some focus, so I added some with FMQ,  stitching stylised alliums in variegated dark purple YLI thread.

The background was filled with variegated pinks in arched lines echoing the piecing.

All in all, I am really happy with this quilt - the sunset colours, the curvy shapes (I'm thinking of stained glass cathedral windows, what do you see?), flowers - what's not to love? I think I'll try and explore more grids of this kind.

Linking up to: Off the Wall Friday at Creations by Nina-Marie

Can I Get A Whoop Whoop at Confessions of a Fabric Addict