The Modern Quilt Guild is hosting a Riley Blake quilt challenge. All members who applied were given 6 fat eighths of Riley Blake fabric and they could make whatever they liked as long as it was quilted.

The rules were that you didn’t have to use all the fabrics you were given, that you could use any solids with them and any other Riley Blake prints.

I didn’t use the blue gingham and the turquoise chevron in my quilt. This actually surprised me as these are my favourite colours. However the whole process was organic.

I began with the centre and I used my Andalusian tile templates with the dark grey and the grey and white stripe fabrics and hand-pieced them to make this.

I had then intended to pair them with the blue and turquoise fabrics. I looked for a suitable background to put the central medallion on but none of the greys I had did anything at all for it. I didn’t have a suitable blue or turquoise solid so I opted for this really bright yellow.

I hand appliquéd the medallion to the background and then had to ponder my next move. I cut a star out of the white spot on yellow fabric using my templates and appliquéd it to the centre of the medallion.

I bought some grey Riley Blake small chevron and used it for the first border and then decided to use the white spotted yellow fabric as cornerstones and make a Riley Blake white solid border with four hexagons from my tile templates made from the orange design fabric and hand appliquéd them on. 

I then added another grey chevron border. I almost finished at this stage but I really have no use for small quilts so I decided to keep going.

I sewed two fabrics together in strips to make a wide border – a Riley Blake white solid and a Riley Blake grey solid. This looked unfinished somehow so I decided to make a zigzag of the white spot on orange Riley Blake fabric I had bought. Here’s how I did it.

I had bought a large grey chevron but it’s size just didn’t fit this quilt so I used it as a template to make the zigzag. I ironed some freezer paper onto the large chevron and traced the zigzag through it with a small ruler and pencil.

Then I peeled off the freezer paper and cut the zigzag out. Once this was done I ironed the freezer paper to the orange fabric, wrong side up.

I cut around the zigzag with the freezer paper still attached to the fabric, leaving a 1/4″ seam allowance. I then pressed the allowance down before removing the freezer paper. I removed a little at a time fabric glueing as I went.

I hand appliquéd the zigzag at the join of the white and grey borders with Aurifil 50wt thread. The borders were all only as long as the square of the quilt as I was planning on cornerstones as I didn’t have enough fabric – oops! This meant leaving loose ends of zigzag at each edge to appliqué together once the corner stones were in place.

The outermost border is a lovely grey and white Riley Blake fabric called Shuffle. I didn’t have enough of this and had to fiddle around but luckily you can’t tell. I added cornerstones of the yellow spotted fabric and then bound the whole thing with Riley Blake solid orange. Want to see the whole quilt?

Here it is…

Hand quilting

I hand quilted the whole quilt and rather than describe it all I’ll show you some photos of the individual pieces, and the back. You might have to click on the photos to be able to see the details.