The amazing quilts I get to work on! This is another of QuilToni's amazing Pixelated creations. She's hosting a Quilt-A-Long for this one - want to make your own? Check out her site.
This is the image of the quilt design. I still find it amazing how the fabric and piecing and quilting bring ideas and images to life.
All of the blocks. To stitch this quilt, I did ditch stitch all of the shapes to give them definition and to be able to stitch minimally inside the character, to let it come to the foreground.
Here is the Bat. He gets a curvy, swoopy background and just a few curves.
The Cauldron has wavy lines running horizontally.
The Jack-o-Lantern has a big basket weave background and a few arcs in the pumpkin.
The Full Moon has ribbons of moonlight radiating out.
The Black Cat has some spiky fur and random spiky background.
the Black Flame candle has horizontal matchstick quilting in the background, a few drips of melted candle and some smoke wisps.
Mr. Ghost has wispy echoes in his body, a checkered background and the "BOO" has matchstick quilting.
Poison has "X's" on the stopper and bottle top, checkerboard in the background.
Magic has swoops and stars, and just as you can never reliably contain magic, the stars escape the block and peek into the border sashing.
The Magic Hat has a checkerboard with alternate squares filled and just a few stitches in the hat.
The Spider has spun a few webs.
The Tombstone background has another checkerboard background, this one woven with alternating fill to create a weave. The lettering is "RIP" at the top, and scribbles suggesting detail.
The backing is a wonderful purple ombre from Northcott.
I had a *lot* of fun with this border and sashings! Straight lines can be magnificent. Throughout the border and sashing, the lines are about 1/2" apart, and change direction randomly, creating a crosshatch where the directions overlap.
I did play with threads for this quilt, colour matching the background or the character. The bobbin thread is light grey throughout. Here are the brights, all Hab 'n Dash Glide thread: Iris, Bombay blue, Kiwi, Flame, Bark.
The neutrals: Slate, Yellow Whisper, White, Light Grey. The dark thread is "Shadow", not quite black, which helps showing the stitching in the black fabric a titch better than a black does.
For the batting, as this piece was intended to be a wall hanging / display piece, we used a double layer of Quilters Dream 70/30 batting for stability on the bottom, and Quilters Dream Puff batting as the top layer, for fabulous stitch definition.
My Bernina QMatic calculates 174,496 stitches in this quilt.