Pickle Dish Quilt

Happy New Year everyone! Let's start 2017 with a brand new quilt!

This is yet another pickle dish quilt, this time a straight-up version of the traditional pattern, made completely in Jennifer Paganelli's new line Hotel Frederiksted (for Free Spirit Fabrics).

Yay! It made the cover of Today's Quilter! I actually received my copy before Christmas but have been waiting till the official publication day to post about it.

This is the third quilt I have made with Jennifer's fabric and the pressure was on to do something spectacular. The quilt I made with her previous line was this New York Beauty, probably one of my most popular quilts ever!

So I really couldn't just rattle something off (not that I ever do!).

I knew when I suggested doing a pickle dish that I would regret it once I started endlessly piecing those spiky curves, but somehow that didn't stop me! I've always wanted to make one and what better fabric to use.

The editor didn't even know what it was, she just said yes after hearing the name! As she said in the magazine "you had me at 'pickle dish'!" 😁

The whole collection is wonderfully bright and fresh, a perfect tonic to this dark, grey time of year (in Scotland). I used the fabrics in a similar way to the New York Beauty, choosing white for all the spikes and used the red patterned fabrics for the background. The 'lemon' shapes were great for showing off the larger scale flowers and birds in the fabric.

It's quilted with a pale green variegated shade of Aurifil 50 and a sort of flame design, which worked so well that I've used a version of it since on my Starlights quilt. I am sure I will use it again soon.

The backing is Spot On by Robert Kaufman in Pomegranite.

Today's Quilter did their usual lovely styling. 

The fabric really makes this quilt, so exuberant and pretty! 

Unfortunately I have not managed to order it for the shop (though the rep is coming to see me next week so there's still time!), however UK peeps can order it from the wonderful Sugar Bowl Crafts.

Having made a traditional, an improv and a subverted version of this design in the last year I think I may have done enough Pickle Dishes for a while! 

But then again, you never know...

Hot Water Microbes Quilt - Ta dah!

Finished and with a new name! 

I wrote all about this quilt as a WIP last week and it was called 'Pickled' then, but my collaborator Tatyana had a better idea (well actually it was her hubby!).

This is a two person quilt where I did the piecing and then Tatyana quilted it any way she wanted, and she had the genius idea to create extra 'ghostly' versions of my strange organisms using fluorescent thread!

She also did fantastic quilting on the pieced microbes (yes they do also look like venus flytraps and Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, but we are going with the microbes angle!), and in the background with these swathes of bubbles and ripples.

And we got it finished in time to enter it to QuiltCon East! The deadline was today. I also entered my Conkers Quilt so fingers crossed one of them gets in! 😊 (I've only just realised that emojis are now available on blogger!!)

Do you like my binding? It was hard to decide what to use on such a dramatic, modern looking quilt so I thought I would keep it simple with solids but make a random stripe picking out shades from the 'microbes', along with plenty of black.

Tatyana used a double layer of black 80/20 wadding for this which makes the motifs really pop out and gives it a perfect weight for a wall hanging, which I had intended this to be (rather than a bed quilt). It measures 51 x 65 inches.

I am very much in love with it, especially the awesome quilting, and it turned out exactly as I had imagined, in fact even better!!

In my description for the entry I said:
"The quilt could be a depiction of the deepest ocean or perhaps something taking place deep inside ourselves."
So quite a profound little quilt!

Pickled!

I am juggling three very different quilt projects at the moment, with all of them about to reach fruition over the next week or so. I thought it would be nice to share a WIP story about this particular quilt which I hope to show you finished very soon.

I've become a bit obsessed with the Pickle Dish pattern! Not only have I recently made a traditional version (sneak peek below, finished quilt will be in Today's Quilter in the New Year)...

...but I also made my Conkers Quilt which is a take on the same pattern but using different techniques (pattern available from The Thread House).

A couple of years ago I made this mini quilt for an IG swap. It was an experiment with improv piecing - could I improv piece a pickle dish block? And the answer was yes I could! I called this one Snappy Pickledish.

I then turned the technique into a class which I taught in Sweden last year. The blocks below were made for that class (having given the original away obviously!).

While playing around I decided to try a very minimalist version without the corner squares and with the 'dish' (background to spikes/pickles) in the same fabric as the background.

I really loved how this looked and made plans for a very modern quilt with lots of negative space. I intended to make this in time to enter it to the QuiltCon exhibition last year - epic fail! 

But a few months back I managed to carve out a few days to work on it again and started to make more of these pickles. When I shared them on Instagram people said they looked like venus flytraps, or prehistoric fish, or alien eyes!! 

I made big ones and small ones. Some of them were made into a finished square block like the one below...

... and others were left with curved edges like these below.

I then embarked on a mammoth engineering session to get all the 'pickles' pieced into a background. It was challenging but also just the kind of patchwork I love!

So here is the finished top! As you can see the charcoal background fabric is relatively fine (it is a Free Spirit 'basic' that is no longer available sadly), yes that's me behind!

All the way along I had planned this as a collaborative project. My friend and fellow Edinburgh Modern Quilt Guild member, Tatyana Duffie, is an incredibly talented quilter with a long arm machine. I thought it would be great to make a quilt together, with me doing the top and her having free-reign on the quilting.

One of the reason for leaving so much negative space was to give Tatyana plenty of space to work her quilting magic! And that is what is happening right now. I am very excited to see how this turns out - we have discussed it a bit and I know what she has in mind and I think it will be awesome! And fingers crossed it will all be finished in time to enter it to QuiltCon this year!



After all the initial comments on IG  I had seen this as a venus flytrap type of plant, somewhere deep in a dark jungle, with the 'flowers' growing out of the base. But now I think they look more like weird fish/amoeba type things that leave in the deepest part of the ocean (where everything is weird looking) and some of them are swimming upwards.

What do you think? The title for the quilt at the moment is simply 'Pickled', but I am happy to take some suggestions!