rjwilder

The quilt is absolutely stunning, your daughter will love it.

mojo11

Gorgeous quilt!!!!!

Trapunta

Gorgeous quilt. Does the pattern have a name? Sorry, I can't help with your original question.

juliasb

I love this quilt it is to die for gorgeous! Job well done. I think it would be enough quilting but if you think is is going to need more it is always something you can do.

granky

That is one beautiful quilt!

SherylM

Thank you for all of the compliments. This quilt, more than any other quilt I've made, has truly been a labor of love. The pattern is called Unique Batik and it's from the book String Quilts : 11 Fun Patterns for Innovating and Renovating by Elsie M. Campbell. I got it on Amazon.

Long story, how I came to make this one...I'll try for the Reader's Digest version. No promises though.

Two years ago, my daughter and son-in-law and the two kiddos, who live in California, came to visit us (I'm in Michigan.) I asked her to pick out some fabrics because I wanted to make her a quilt. I had bought some Tula Pink fat quarters from her Tabby Road collection because my daughter loves cats, and those were some of the fabrics that she chose, among others.

She had told me that she wanted a string quilt so I had a copy of Mary Hogan's book sent to her, and told her that when I was ready, she could pick out a pattern. Fast forward to this summer...I told her I was ready to start on her quilt and to pick out a pattern.

Well, she couldn't find the book - evidently it was a casualty of a bookcase purge. So she went on Amazon, bought another (different) book, and picked out this pattern. I loved the pattern and didn't want to tell her to pick out a different one, but the problem was that it was designed for several gradated colors of batiks and the fabrics that she'd picked out just weren't going to work. Plus...pandemic, so there was no way I was going to go to a quilt shop to buy 36+ different colors of batiks, not to mention the expense.

I was crying on my friend's shoulder about all of this when she said, "You might hate me for this, but why don't you dye the fabric yourself?" I already had a whole bolt of solid white fabric so I figured, why not? Anyhow, it all turned out better than I expected and I learned several new things, one of them being that I love dyeing fabric!

I've decided that I'll probably go ahead and take the suggestions to SITD around the diamond shapes. If the quilt was just for me I would throw caution to the wind and do the channel quilting, but I don't want to take a chance on this one ever doing anything weird.

I understand that when the batting package says that you can quilt it up to 8" apart, that means both ways. On one blog that I read, the lady said that she's channel quilted several children's quilts 1.5" apart and they've held up just fine through many washes. I don't know what kind of batting she was using though, and I would want to go farther apart than that.

But I really do love the look of channel quilting, so I've decided that I'm going to make a couple of large samples with leftover wool and leftover cotton batting. I'll channel quilt them about 2.5 - 3" apart and throw them in the washer and dryer several times to see how they hold up.

Sharongn

Sheryl, Beautiful top! Your dying job turned out great. The quilting You decided on will look great. Please share pics when you're finished.

quiltingshorttimer

Wow that is a fabulous quilt! I'm with Patrice on this--I'd use either the Monopoly on top or match to the colors but I'd do something that highlights the diamonds.

aashley333

I've never dyed fabric. Could you please share what you did? I like to try new stuff!

SherylM

Well, there's no shortage of information out there and I found much of it not helpful, because I needed to do something specific. I needed 5 or 6 gradations of 6 different colors, but I found some of the instructions for how to do that confusing and incomplete.

My daughter picked out the colors she wanted - I used Procion MX dyes that I bought from Pro Chemical and Dye and I finally found a book on Amazon that gave me the specific information that I needed. It's called Hand-Dyed Fabric Made Easy by Adriene Buffington (I bought a used copy...the new ones are $$$.) I used the "Light to Dark Family" project and the plastic bag method (each piece of fabric goes into a ziploc bag with the dye solution and gets sealed), which was a Godsend.

One of the things I was worried about was the mess, because we're in a rental condo and I was afraid I would get dye everywhere. One of the nice things about the Procion dyes is that they only dye natural fibers, like cotton and wool, so it wiped right off of my white formica countertops and you can't even tell that there was dye in my washer and bathtub.

It was a very easy and fun process and the only part of it that was frustrating was getting all of the excess dye rinsed out, especially the red and blue dyes. It took for.ev.er! I had a lot of fabric to process (about 40 fat quarters - I made more than I needed), so that's a lot of rinsing and a lot of water. If you live in a part of the country where there are water shortages, you need to deal with that.

I really enjoyed the process and loved the results that I got, and can honestly say that I'm hooked! the next dye project that I tackle will be shibori - the Japanese method of tie-dyeing.

It can be intimidating, but it's really not hard. Just don't do a first project with 10 yards of fabric like I did!