Warp and Weft - American Patchwork & Quilting Nine-Patch Challenge Quilt

Today I would like to show my APQ Nine-Patch Challenge Quilt I have named Warp and Weft and take you through its design and production process.

I had heard about the Nine-Patch Challenge in mid summer and knew I wanted to take part but really did not have a good idea for the quilt.  The requirements were that you had to modernize the 9-patch somehow and could make any size quilt and use any fabrics.

In October, I was at work drafting a new patent application on a woven fabric (I write patents for a private industrial textile and chemical company).  The fabric was similar to a shot cotton where the warp yarns (that go along the machine direction) and the weft yarns (that go perpendicular to the machine direction) were different yarns and I noticed that it kind of looked like a 9 patch.  Thus my woven 9-patch idea was born.

I thought that it would be good to use some Essex Yarn Dyed Fabric in black as my background as it has great texture and also has different warp and weft yarns.  I made a quilt sandwich with it and started quilting straight lines.  I was using whites, grays, and blacks of Aurifil in 50wt but it was difficult to see the quilting and it was not giving me the effect I was looking for.  So I switched to 40 wt Aurifil in gentle organic lines which showed up much better against the Essex linen.

After quilting I blocked the quilt to make sure that it was nice and flat for the woven strips.  To make the woven strips, I sewed 2 1/2" x width of fabric pieces in half to make a slightly less than 1" strips (which happened to fit perfectly on my metal yard stick which made ironing the strips a lot easier).

I played around with many different layouts of the strips and have to thank Paige for giving me so much feedback (and for putting up with me texting different pics every few minutes).  I settled on the center strips forming a true 9-patch with the patches on the sides looking to be unraveling.

I used Heat and Bond Lite to attach the strips to the quilt and the plan was that I would hand stitch down the strips while on vacation over Thanksgiving.

Just to hold everything in place I basted the strips on using some turquoise thread at the max stitch length of my machine.  When I finished the basting stitches I really liked the look of the turquoise stitching on the strips so I added some more lines to each strip (which also had the added benefit of eliminating the need to hand stitch the strips down).

For a binding, I auditioned a bunch of options and had first picked a turquoise to match the quilting thread.  I decided that this quilt needed some more pop so I used an orange plaid fabric from Carolyn Friedlander that had some metallic printing.  I think that the binding is actually my favorite part of the quilt.

So Warp and Weft was finally complete and finished at about 41" x 42".  

🌟🌟 Happy News! I submitted Warp and Weft to QuiltCon's APQ 9-Patch Challenge and it got juried into QuiltCon East 2017 :)

I am linking up to Whoop Whoop Friday, Thank Goodness Its Finished Friday, Finish It Up Friday, Fabric Frenzy Friday, and Show Off Saturday @ Sew Can She.