Modern Batik Challenge: Flight

"Flight," 38" x 57", handmade by Pam Geisel, June 2016

This month the Island Batik Ambassador's are making Modern-style quilts. Modern quilts is a style of quilt design that has become popular in the last decade. We were encouraged to use bold colors and prints, have high contrast and graphic areas of solid color, utilize improvisational piecing, and take a minimalism approach to the design with expansive negative space and alternate grid work.

For the cream-colored background I used some of the pre-cut California Creamery jelly roll. The 30 blue and purple fabrics came from the Wind & Sea colletcion, the Desert Rose collection, and the Sweet Pea collection (from last year).

The key for this design for me was using the precut jelly roll fabrics. They come 44" x 2.5". I cut the 30 colored pieces to 13" x 2.5" then cut off between 1" to 1.5" for the inset piece. For the jelly roll fabrics I left the 2.5" width but cut them down to 30", then cut off 1.5" to use as the inset, then randomly cut them in half some where between the 12" and 21" on my cutting table.

I planned the order that the colored fabric would go in, but the cream fabrics were selected mostly at random. (Not entirely because there were two cuts of each fabric and I didn't want two of the same fabric too close to each other so they were separated into group A and group B and I used all of group A before moving to group B).

The strips were then pieced with one long cream piece, the small color inset, the small cream inset, the color and then the second long piece. Sometimes they were pieced in reverse so that the inset pieces would be on the right side.

Then the 30 strips were pieced together. Because the cream pieces were cut in half randomly the colored parts were all on a horizontal grid, but not on a vertical one creating a layout with alternate grid work.

I did straight line quilting 1/4" from each seam then used some of the darkest creams from the California Creamery pre-cuts for my binding. The traditional size for this type of binding is 2.25" wide but I went ahead and used the 2.5" width of the pre-cut fabric.

You can click on any of the photos to see them larger.

More about Flight