Sea Glass and Sand

A calm day on Lake Erie!

    My friend Pam recently moved to a beach side home, where she keeps jars (and jars!) of sea glass found on the beach.   I decided to make her a quilt for her new home, trying to evoke the sea glass and sand.

    I turned to batiks.  I have not made many batik quilts, but my batik previous quilts, which  can be seen here (Tranquility) and here (Ocean Chain), have used some of the same blues and greens that I pulled for this quilt.    I decided to do a disappearing nine-patch which kept larger swaths of the sand colors along with smaller bits of the bright "sea glass" colors.

The blue and green batiks

Tan and other sand color batiks

I cut the batiks into 5 inch squares

I sewed the squares into rows of three, some with the sand colors at either end, and some with all three "sea glass" colors

The final nine-patch had the sand colors in the four corners, with the blues and greens in the center positions.  This quilt used 30 of the nine-patch squares.

I cut the nine-patches down the middle two ways and the result was four squares with larger "sand" colored blocks.

I used my floor to find a pleasing arrangement of the squares. 

I used some wide backing fabric, and decided to quilt with wavy vertical lines, using my walking foot.  I used binder clips to keep the bulky ends of the quilt from falling over the table's edge. 

Quilt wrangling!   I also use my shoulder as an additional holder for the bulky parts of a quilt.

I left the quilt on the couch when I was sewing on the binding.  This quilt definitely got the Chester seal of approval! 

I used an Aurifil varigated blue for the quilting on top, and a tan Aurifil in the bobbin.   I used 6 full bobbins of thread for the quilting!  The resulting quilting, after washing, turned out quite nicely!  

    The final quilt measures about 65 by 77 inches, and is nicely held high by my trusty quilt-holder!

     I like how the darks and light make so much movement in the quilt.  I ended up binding with scraps from the batiks and feel that turned out nicely.  

    I now plan to tackle my stash!  I have so many quilts I want to create, but I need to get my fabrics and scraps in order first!  I'll be posting about my progress with that project.

Enjoy the autumn!
Take care,
Gretchen