my own curated quilt

Have you seen any of the amazing little quilts popping up in your social media feed, all using color and a design element linking them, and hash tagged with #curatedquilt ?

I have been seeing them for some time, and every time I see one, I get the itch to join in and make something, but talk myself out of it.

First, about Curated Quilts. The challenge is fairly simple. They give you a color palette and a design element and the only real steadfast rule is that the mini be between 10 inches square and 16 inches square. The colors described are to be used all, or in part, and are not necessarily Kona colors. What this means is that we don't necessarily have to rush out and buy fabrics. We can use what we have to take part in this.

Here is the inspiration picture.

Image found on Curated Quilts post Triangle Mini Quilts

What first caught me was the triangle aspect. Geese and triangles are one of my favorite blocks. And one of my favorite things to do with triangles is soften them up.

For example, with this quilt below, I let the sharp geese be the focus, but I created a background with mixed fabrics, hoping to relax the lines a bit.

I thought a lot of people might be doing geese and I challenged myself to thing of other ways you can soften the angles of the triangle. So I came up with curves. 

I omitted the orange from the challenge inspo photo. I didn't really have a solid that matched, or a print that read as a solid, and I didn't want a print to take away from the vision I was working towards.

I decided that even though the star was the triangle shape, to continue to soften it, I quilted it following a curve.

I got out my quilting marker (I use a blunt edged tracing wheel that my wonderful quilty friend Brooke sent me!!) and was just about to mark the curves when I decided to not do that and instead embrace the wonkiness of "organic" quilting-- my fancy name for quilting without guides, a method that ends up wonky and looking very human rather than straight and precise.

I was struggling with binding color and how to bind when I stepped off the "what if I did xxx" deep end! I happened to look over and see a lime green thread in my thread basket- it was a recent gift in a swap I did. I was thinking 'how can I use this??' when I remembered a post about binding I read several years ago. The post can be found on Jolene's blog here . In the post, she mentions several methods of binding and talks about zig zag stitching the binding to the front. I have always been intrigued but have yet to give it a go. It flashed in my head and I thought it would be perfect for this mini because the lime thread would highlight the binding stitches and incorporate the triangle shape in an unexpected way.

So here it is!! My Curated Quilts mini quilt, that I am lovingly calling Soft Angles. It finishes at precisely 16 inches square and taught me a lot of about challenging myself to try new things and trust myself. I waste so much creative time trying to come up with something truly unique and original that I talk myself out of things or do not even begin because I don't want to be redundant. I am working on that, and this mini was like a great big jump forward!!