Oceanside

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Difficulty:

Category: Quilting

Type of item: Functional

For: Men

Style: Classic, Traditional, Casual

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Materials

Batiks, 80/20 batting, 60 wt polyester threads for quilting.

What was your inspiration?

My nephew bought his first home in Florida and I wanted to create something that blended with his appeal to modern design styling he used in decorating his home. I also wanted to pick up the locale with the colors of ocean, beach, sky. I had a lot of batik strips that fit into that color theme and went with those to create the braiding. The rest fell into place.

I have to say, I chose to soften it by making a slightly curved edge. That of course necessitated making bias binding, of which there were 400" to make! But I like the look of the binding vs. having it just be a traditional straight edge.

What are you most proud of?

That all the strips used in the 320" of braiding sewn were from a sale of "bag ties" from Keepsake Quiltings Annual Tent Sale in June 2012! The whole box cost $10 but had about 80% batik strips! I would say the box weighed about 4-5 lbs, so it was inexpensive! (I've used these strips all year to create purses, mug mats, make up bags, quilts and many paper piecing projects as well!)

The quilting was done with stitch in the ditch in the braided areas as I wanted it to be prominent. I used a loose open wave design in the thin blue borders around each braided section to slightly pull back those sections. The sashing and border areas were heavily quilted with a repeat and random open leave pattern.

My Handi Quilter sit down 16" mid arm machine allows me to "trip" count the number of stitches and I remembered to reset it before I began this queen size quilt. I had 197,672 quilting stitches in this quilt when I finished the quilting!

What advice would you give someone starting this project?

I made the queen size quilt and began with making a long continuous braid, which was then cut down into the section sizes needed. Perhaps it would have been less daunting to make them in the segment sizes needed. I say this because the finished braid made continuous equaled 320" long! That made ironing and cutting a little more difficult. But it was fun, as the photo of the braid shows, it was the talk of a quilting retreat where I had begun this quilt!

It is a simple pattern overall, nothing too daunting at all! I would highly recommend it to anyone, even beginning quilters as it's not complex.