Cosmic Quilt

I didn’t really know what to call this quilt. The pattern is modern and the fabric is really out there. Not surprisingly, it’s Tula Pink fabric. I’m not sure what the collection is called, but it has otters on Saturn, so I think Cosmic kind of covers it.

This is another engagement quilt that I made for a dear friend’s daughter. They are a science/math family. The couple met at Technion, which is an engineering and science university in Haifa. I wanted to have a math-y type looking quilt for them because it just seemed like the right thing to do. 3D dimensional quilt fits the bill.

I let the kids know what I was up to and asked them to come over and have a look at my stash of fabric. They looked around and found a really cool fat quarter bundle that I got in Sew Sampler box from Fat Quarter Shop months ago.

Sometimes I have fabric that I just find too pretty to cut in to. This is one of those bundles. The colors and patterns are so amazing that I just like to have them around. I’m glad that they chose it because if they hadn’t it would have probably stayed on my shelf indefinitely. This bundle only had 8 fat quarters, and I wanted to make sure to get the most out of the fabric that I could.

The more cuts that you make in fabric, the more of it is lost in the seam allowance.  I went with largeish squares so that I wouldn’t lose the fabrics’ patterns. I was able to get a good 21″ in width with a bit to spare. 21 divides very nicely into 3, so my squares were  7″ each. From each fat quarter, I cut out 6 squares.

To create the 3D look, I added grey shadows to the boxes. The width of the shadow is about 1/3 the width of the color block. I try to avoid weird fractions so I rounded it to  2 1/4″ in the grey fabric. For each square, there are two 5 1/4″  x 2 1/4″ grey strips and two 2 1/4″ x 2 1/4 ” background squares.

If you would like to create it as well, sew two background square to two grey strip. Add one of them to the right side of the colorful square, with the background square at the top. (If you are using directional fabric, take that into account). Add the other strip to the bottom of the block, matching up the grey fabric in the right corner.

I set up the blocks diagonally, colorwise. The color falls the same way that the shadow falls. The quilt is 6 columns by 8 rows.  I added a 2 1/4″ x 9″ background strip between each block. Between each row, there is 2 1/4″ border, as well as the sides of the quilt.

When I quilted the quilt, I tried to emphasize the feeling that was 3D. I quilted the grey areas densely to make the fall more to the background. I quilted the color blocks off of the center of the blocks to pull the eye closer to the shadow.

The background is simple straight lines that go from the top left corner to the bottom right of the quilt. The idea was that light was coming from the top and creating the shadow. I don’t know if translated correctly on the quilt, but I’m happy with it.

You can tell that I really like the new couple because I actually changed my thread color – grey is quilted with grey and the rest is quilted with cream thread.

This was a really fun quilt to make. I’m really pleased with the way it came out. I hope the young couple likes it as well.

I think that I’m all caught up with quilt presents (at least for now). I’ve got a few other projects that I need to finish up. I’ll try to write about those next time.