Old World- A Modern Dresden Quilt

In the spring, The Cincinnati Modern Quilt Guild will have a show at International Quilt Festival here in town. It's pretty neat to be representing modern quilting in a very large show full of jaw-droppingly beautiful traditional and art quilts. We had to have them done last week to get photos in to IQF. Even though it was a slightly inconvenient time to be rushing to finish a quilt, I'm so glad I participated. We will have over 20 quilts in the show, all of them a different modern take on dresden plates. 

 I've never made a dresden plate before. I knew I wanted mine to be completely round instead of having pointed blades, and I knew I wanted to have only a few of them in my quilt, along with lots of negative space. I've been wanting to do a quilt in all neutrals for a while now, so this high-contrast black and white design came to me. I started collecting prints that had no color and were either very low value or dark value. All of them came from Sewn Studio or Pink Castle. I used an easy dresden ruler to cut them, and after stitching all the blades together, I sewed a circle of muslin to the right sides of the circles, then cut the middle of the muslin away and turned it right side out so the edges would be turned under for appliquéing.

After making a background out of Moda Bella Black and Feather, (not quite white, more of a super pale gray) I stitched the circles to it with invisible thread. It was kind of pain to work with, but made the appliqué look really clean. There's really no other good way I could have done it. I did the center circles the same way, and then I was ready for quilting. 

Here on the back you can see better how I free-motion quilted in the dresdens (also with the invisible thread.) This is the first time I've quilted different areas of a quilt differently based on the design, rather than using an all-over quilting method. I drew some inspiration from Angela Walter's book, thanks to my mom. Even though I almost always prefer straight lines style-wise, I really want to keep getting better at it. 

After quilting those plume-like designs, I decided to torture myself by doing a gazilion curvy radiating lines 3/8" apart. Actually, it wasn't too bad and I enjoyed it for the most part. With that much white space, I really couldn't wuss out on the quilting. It had to be wowza quilting. The back has black in the same place as the front and then all my leftover lighter prints on the reverse of the white side. I even matched up the black and white sides on the binding. It finished around 70" x 60". 

I'm really happy with this quilt and feel it's so different from things I've done before. I learned a lot doing it. Nick says it's his favorite quilt yet so I'm giving it him... But not until after April. It's got to be pristine until show time!