Tangier Ikat Quilt

The last item in my FO parade is a quilt.  I pieced the top of this quilt last spring, and it's been sitting around since then waiting to be sandwiched and quilted together.

The fabrics are 10 different prints in oranges, hot pinks and dark corals, with accents in green, aqua and white.  I bought these as a fat quarter bundle which included one cut of each print in the series.  It's been over a year since I bought the fabric, so of course it's no longer available as a FQ bundle, but some of the prints are still around.

I wanted this top to look very busy and kind of souk-esque.  I think I succeeded!

I find fat quarters to be a difficult size to work with.  I much prefer to cut quilt pieces from yardage.  It took me a long time to figure out how to use all of the fabrics, in the way I wanted to use them.  Some of the prints are quite large, as you can see, and I didn't want to break those up too much.

Finally I decided to cut each piece into squares and rectangles of 9" x 9", 9" x 6" and 9" x 3".  The 6" and 3" rectangles got sewn together to make 9" squares, and then all the squares were sewn together with the rectangles being oriented in different directions.  The main purpose of this quilt is to give me some beautiful, cheerful fabrics to look at throughout the dreary days of winter.

I had every intention of free-motion quilting this with random squiggles, but I gave up after about 3" of that!  This quilt is heavy!  And rather large, so I didn't think my arms could hang in there long enough to get it all done.  So I switched back to my walking foot and just did straight-line quilting spaced about 4" apart.

The batting was also pieced together from scraps of previous quilts, using my edge-joining foot and a wide zigzag stitch.  I was glad to get those used up - they take up a lot of room!

The binding is a very pale blue and white stripe, which I think ties in nicely with the aqua and green in the main fabrics.  And the backing is plain muslin.

I was anxious to start using this quilt, so I sandwiched, quilted and bound it all in one day last week!  And it's been used every night since :-)