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Quilt: May 2019: Pantone Challenge

The short story of this quilt is that I was inspired to play around with the scale and introduce negative space to result in a more modern interpretation of a more traditional quilting layout / design (rail fence). The longer story behind this motivation is that I really have been trying to crack the code to "modern traditionalism", i.e., what is a nice blend of modern and traditionalism in quilting and can I live in that space or am I destined to live strictly on the "modern" side?

For me, playing with scale and negative space in the rails fence design meant scaling up and down the sizes of the repeated elements, resulting in negative space in the largest of the repeated elements, allowing for fun quilty texture in those spaces.

I was working on this design around the time of the Pantone challenge, so I decided to go with an all coral quilt (Free Spirit in Hibiscus) with a very light pink Riley Blake (that was original slated for the Riley Blake challenge). At the time, I thought this particular design would be suitable for any two color choices, with the darker as the background and the lighter as the pieced bits throughout. I designed the layout in Photoshop and the design measured around 94" square.

I strip pieced on my Juki using Aurifil 50wt thread, and hit a few issues with accuracy (not precision!), so I had to adjust my measurements slightly as I went along. My final quilt top measured 100" square and was a little too big for my longarm, but I was able to fit most of it on the frame and rotate to complete the quilting. I used Aurifil Forty3 and 40wt on my Juki longarm, mostly because I was given the Forty3 as an Aurifil Artisan, and I wanted to see how it quilted (it worked well!). Warm & Natural cotton batting was used and organic cotton rainbow pattern duvet covers from H&M were used for the back. The custom longarm quilting introduced additional linear texture throughout.

Check out the #stephskardalquiltsmay2019 images on Instagram!