Drunkards Path Challenge Quilt

Naperville Modern Quilters Guild met last night. We are a small in number but very prolific!

Many of us had made quilts for the IQF Chicago Modern Quilt Guild Drunkards Path Challenge and we heard this week whether our entries had been accepted or not. Several people’s quilts had been declined and we sympathized freely. We think eight were accepted which, considering only twenty four will be on show, will be a great representation of our group.

It’s always hard to know why your quilt was rejected. In this case we wondered whether the bigger size requirement this year meant less quilts will be shown? Was it the more novelty type ones that didn’t get in? In past years everyone’s quilts were hung so it does makes it particularly hard…

Still, quilters are hardy souls and we agreed that all the quilts had been made with love and were very acceptable to us. Everyone will live on to make another quilt!

With all that I was very happy to have my 48″ square quilt accepted to be shown in April.

I used a charm pack of bright dotted fabrics for my quarter circles and yardage of an Art Gallery almost white solid for the background.

My quilt almost didn’t get made. I have a set of drunkards path templates in various sizes and I cut my backgrounds with a non matching template to the circle pieces… I was not happy!

In the end I used the miscut pieces for the half square triangles around the edge, and after running into more problems with my curved seams I appliquéd the colored bits to their backgrounds with a blanket stitch. I wanted the quarter circles to look like triangles so I set the blocks on point, arranging them in some sort of color order with lots of the white squares to fill in the gaps.

I decided to use a Quilters Dream wool batt and pin basted my layers carefully with lots of pins.

It was a very pouffy sandwich!

Quilting went on forever. At on point I thought it would never flatten out… see the distorted bits?

Here’s a full view half way through the quilting process… cool edges?

But eventually everything came together. I used a few different pastel variegated threads from Wonderfil and Mettler, including a 12 wt. Fruitti thread for more definition. There’s also a white Aurifil thread for some of the lines to keep it all a little calmer… I missed every sixth line for an interesting irregular matchstick effect. All quilted it was time to trim and bind.

I taped two 24″ rulers end to end to make sure my quilt really was 48″ in each direction and added some measured narrow border strips to keep everything square. I had it in mind to add some little strips of color at the top right hand side of those strips. I think I like the way they add an unexpected surprise to the design!

Then all I needed was a name and description for my quilt. The colored arcs remind me of the cherries on top of the iced buns of my younger days so that was it…

Cherry on the Top!

“Individual drunkards path style blocks were constructed using a charm pack of bright colors and then stitched together on point. The minimalist design reminds me of cherries on frosted cupcakes. 
Heavily quilted with close straight lines and a variety of different weight threads for lots of texture.”

Not perfect but done… and accepted for exhibition!