Hey Everyone, welcome back to Coffee Talk Saturday.

Only a few days left to get ready for the spring Creativfestival show.  And I must say there is still lots to do and cram into those few remaining days. I am sure most of the vendors are feeling this way. When I signed up way back when – November of 2013 I thought lots of time to get everything ready. Well, there was but believe me the time just flies by and all of a sudden the show is upon us.

This year I am doing 2 presentations each day along with having a booth. When I asked to do the presentations I thought what can I talk about that is interesting and fun. I put my thinking cap on and came up with 2 ideas. One presentation is on how to add contrast in your quilts and the other about the technique of quilt as you go but with a bit of a twist.

The piece pictured above is part of my Stitch & Flip: Design As You Go presentation.  I call it Merging Traffic.

I thought how can I create something fun and a little more modern with 2 ½″ strips and the stitch and flip method of quilt as you go. As I thought about it this idea took form and I started designing with a jelly roll. I don’t always use a jelly roll for these designs but they are mostly done with strips of some sort.

The strips can be anywhere from ½″ to 5″ wide. I stopped at 5″ because if I don’t add any extra quilting then I want the quilting lines that are still there from the stitch and flip to be still fairly close together.

With the Merging Traffic design I pieced the strips and added in the black and grey pieces as I went. They appear to be a bit random but in fact I did draw out a grid on some graph paper for placement of the pieces.

The strips were gradated from light to dark and so I chose to have the lighter part of the strip at the top of the piece with the darker area at the bottom. Strategic cutting of the pieces allowed the gradation to flow between the black and grey pieces.

A design wall comes in very handy for this type of designing with all the strips in place ready to be sewn to the layers.

Strips on the design wall

Once together I added extra quilting to this piece and bound the edges with black.

Close up of quilting

To learn more about this Stitch & Flip: Design As You Go technique join me on Friday April 25th at 1:30 or Saturday April 26th at 3:30 in Rm 102 at the International Centre where Creativfestival is being held. 

Hope to see you there.

Happy Quilting!