Dec. It's All Up to You Challenge

 

The December Island Batik Challenge is called It's All Up to You!

This month the Island Batik Ambassadors could make anything we wanted.  I love this challenge as there are always things I've put on a back burner to do at some later time.  Since this was a winter challenge I picked the collage Winter Cardinal pattern by Emily Taylor.  I love her patterns and have made a couple in the past.

This is Woodlands I made in a free challenge month in April 2021

And here is a frog from another free month challenge in March 2023

Here is her downloadable pattern for Winter Cardinal.

I pulled lots of red, green and some brown Island Batik fabrics from my stash.  Collage quilting is always a bit challenging, but also fun to see the image take shape.  The fabric pieces are backed with Steam a Seam 2 fusible webbing.

Some progress.  Lots of fabrics and lots of little pieces.

The cardinal is all fused together as one piece on parchment paper, and then I had to work on the background.  I used one of Island Batik Basics fabrics called Pewter for the background.  It was a lovely color for the project.  Can you see the birds feet on the bottom branch?

Once the bird and background are all fused it is time to finish the project.  Emily had a technique where she fused a piece of stabilizer to the back and added a facing around the quilt.  She also didn't do any quilting!  I thought I'd give this a try as this was a small project (13"x 14").  Then I also could avoid quilting thru all the layers of fabric in the cardinal.

Here is a photo of the facing ready to be sewn.  There are folded triangles in the corners under the facing strips.  It is all sewn at the same time then corners trimmed and it is all turned to the back and pressed.  Sorry for the fuzzy photo, but you can get the idea.

Once it is turned and pressed you can hand stitch the facing or use a fusible 1/4" tape by Steam a Seam2 to secure the facing.  This was very easy.  You can see the corner triangles which are nice for fitting a  rod in for hanging the quilt.

As always Schmetz needles work great when sewing batik fabrics.

Once again, here is my Winter Cardinal.

Many thanks to Island Batik and Schmetz Needles for supplying products for this project thru the Island Batik Ambassador program