MQG QuiltCon Challenge Quilt - Blogger's Quilt Festival

I am happy to have finished my QuiltCon Challenge quilt I am calling "Oh the Places You'll Go" in time for the Biannual Blogger's Quilt Festival.

I decided to take part in The Modern Quilt Guild's QuiltCon Michael Miller Spring Cotton Couture Challenge.  For the Cotton Couture challenge we were sent 7 fat eighths of the spring cotton couture fabrics and had to make a quilt using only Michel Miller solids for the quilt top (but we could use Michael Miller solids or prints for the binding and backing).

For this challenge, I decided to try two new techniques: curved piecing and quilting in a concentric circle.  I kept the size of the quilt small (the quilt wound finished at about the size of a fat quarter) which made the quilt quick and fun to make.

I cut the fat eighths into strips with varying widths from 1" to 1.5" and sewed the strips into blocks using of two alternating colors.  I thought the blocks looked like a wonderful fabric bouquet before ironing :)

I sewed 3-4 blocks together to get rows of stripes.

Next, I cut I used curved piecing to piece the quilt top.  The curved piecing went pretty well, I went very slowly with no pinning and I only had one small place where I had to bring out the seam ripper.  When I saw the groupings of colored stripes it reminded me of one of my favorite Dr. Seuss books, "Oh the Places You'll Go".

With all of the curved piecing I thought that a spiral type of quilting would look good.  As I have already tried spiral quilting, I decided to try concentric circle quilting for the first time.  At first I thought about having one concentric circle across the whole quilt top, but then I decided that I would add multiple concentric circles so I could have the interference patterns between the circles.

I love the texture of the quilting against the curved piecing.

I even made a fun pincushion using some of the quilt top trimmings.

This quilt was a fun learning experience.  Fingers crossed it will get into QuiltCon :)

Quilt Stats:

Fabrics: Spring Cotton Couture by Michael Miller
Pattern: Improv strip piecing and curved piecing
Quilting: Concentric Circles
Batting: Warm & White
Finished Size: 20" x 18"

I am linking up the Amy's Blogger Quilt Festival in the Mini Quilt Division.  My other entry is Vintage Stars and can be found here.

If you have stopped by my blog for the first time from the quilt festival thank you!  You can find some of my finishes, tutorials, and mystery quilt-a-long on the tabs at the top of the page.  I am also on Instagram as MeadowMistDesigns.

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

Modern Quilt Guild Challenge Quilt Finished

I am very happy to show you my finished MQG Challenge quilt today, Courthouse Petals. The challenge was to create a quilted article using some fat eighths of Petal Pinwheels (and piece of fabric from another line) combined with any other Michael Miller print and/or any solid.

In the beginning, I was trying to design a quilt using only the Petal Pinwheels collection by Michael Miller.  I found this difficult as the value of the prints are all very similar so the quilts I designed in EQ7 all looked really flat.  I decided to add in the Kona Coal which brought depth to the quilt and good contrast to the Petal Pinwheels fabrics (I also purchased additional Petal Pinwheels fabrics for additional yardage and print variation).

My work-in-progress posts on the quilt can be found here and here.

After going through tons and tons of different designs, I settled on taking a classic courthouse block and updating it.  I alternated the prints and the coal creating a strong contrast and geometric shape.  I also varied the width of the different block layers, made the block really large (finishing at about 68" x 68"), and added some very dense quilting.

For the quilting, I wanted to add a lot of texture to the gray areas so I decided on a dense back and forth quilting design in a matching gray thread with lines are a little less than 1/4" apart.  Because there is more than 2 yards of Kona Coal used in the quilt, the dense back and forth quilting took me almost 11 hours.  For the print area, I used an off-white thread to blend in as best as possible and quilted using a small scale meandering pattern.  

This quilt was the first time I had not used Warm & Natural, but used a bamboo batting called Nature-Fil by Fairfield.  I was very pleased with the batting and how soft the quilt still is after all of that tight quilting.  I will be doing a full review on my experiences with the batting once I have a chance to wash the quilt to test it washability.

Here are some more pictures of the finish...

Thanks for taking a look!  This was a very fun challenge to take part in and I have enjoyed seeing everyone's creations.  It is amazing how starting with the same fabrics, quilters came up with such different ideas.

Quilt stats:
Design: Modern variation on a court house block
Fabrics:  Petal Pinwheel by Michael Miller and Kona Coal
Size: 68" x 68"
Quilted: Dense back and forth quilting in the gray areas using Aurifil 1246
               Small scale meandering in the patterned areas using Aurifil 2021
               on my Bernina 710

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