Make It Modern - QuiltCon Submission in Confetti Cottons™ -

Hello Makers! It’s Sara from @SaraBQuilts and I am here to talk about a very special project that is heading to Phoenix in February! Using Riley Blake Design’s Confetti Cottons™, I created a large-scale appliqué quilt, titled “All That Follows”, to enter into QuiltCon. This project is very personal to me and I am so excited to share it with you.

The idea came to me back in May when I was experiencing my own breast cancer scare. For those of you who do not follow me, I lost my amazing mom to breast cancer almost 7 years ago. Because of her loss, I have been able to receive incredible care at a high risk clinic and ensure that if I do have cancer one day, it will be caught very early. While waiting for biopsy results, I thought about how I got to this point. One moment, one event, one tragedy created lasting repercussions that carry on to this day.

While the idea for this quilt came from a sorrowful place, sewing and creating are two things that bring me joy and allow me to overcome my grief. I spent almost every night for 3 months hand sewing this quilt and that helps me to work through so much of my sadness and anxiety.

Once I knew that I wanted to create a water ripple to represent my idea, I needed to come up with a color scheme. A week prior to coming up with my plan, Michigan was lucky enough to get an amazing show in the sky with northern lights! I snapped a photo and the colors were so vivid and beautiful. I used the Riley Blake Designs Confetti Cottons™ color card to match the northern lights as best I could. The Confetti Cottons™ have such a nice range of color that it was easy to do.

Since I rarely use solid fabrics, this was actually the first project I have ever used Confetti Cottons™ and it was such a wonderful surprise! I have appliquéd with a lot of fabrics and the Confetti Cottons™ may be the easiest and best I have worked with. The thickness and weave kept them from fraying with all the handling and they molded to the shapes beautifully! There are lots of curves in this quilt and they all turned out very smooth. I loved working with the Confetti Cottons™.

I will not go too into depth about my creation process, but I made very large templates and prepped my appliqué using the same technique I use for small appliqué and English Paper Piecing projects. The process is not hard, but the large pieces make handling the fabric more challenging. I also had to work using the entire quilt top at once, rather than in sections. This required a lot of handling and movement of the quilt. The Confetti Cottons™ held together so nicely.

This quilt is entirely hand sewn (except for the binding and one piece of fabric I had to piece together to make it the right width) and that was important to me. This quilt is about my process of overcoming grief and a major part of that is by using my hands to create things. I wanted to hand stitch and hand quilt it to honor that process. I like to hand appliqué with 50 wt thread and hand quilt with 10 wt thread.

As you can see from my pictures, I had lots of furry helpers along the way! My dogs loved how soft these Riley Blake Confetti Cottons™ are and I know you will too! If you are in Phoenix for QuiltCon and see me there, please come by and say hi. I hope you have enjoyed learning about my design process for this quilt and learning more about my new favorite solids, Confetti Cottons™!!