New York Beauty Quilt

This is Ulrike’s stunning New York Beauty quilt and she said it took her 10 years to complete this top!  It is made with all batik fabrics and batik backing.    The blocks and border were all paper pieced and I love the blocks put on an angle creating stars in the sashing.   The whole quilt is stitched in the ditch which took the most work and then I rolled it back and added the quilting designs.  I did the same feather in the outer curve in all the blocks, added pebbles to some of the arcs and loops to others.  It took me a while to figure out what to quilt in the sashing but finally came up with the petal curl design the fit in the space nicely.  I have lots of pictures to share!

The batting is Quilters Dream Blend and the threads are So Fine.

When I posted a picture of the quilt top last week I had a lot of questions about stitch in the ditch and what threads so here is what I used.   So Fine #456 is the magic gray green that I used on all the blocks, it blended very well with all the colors.  I matched thread with the two purples in the sashing for that design element as I wanted the thread to blend in on the sashing.  I also used a light beige for SID around the outer border spikes.

When I stitch in the ditch I don’t always stitch in the ditch side.  Depending on the thread I’m using and the final look I’m going for I sometimes will stitch on the high side of the ditch to keep the thread in the same color fabric as the thread.  I did this in the outer border in the light beige fabrics as I wanted the colour spikes to really pop!  

But in the blocks themselves I just stitched on the low side of the ditch as I was quilting across so many colors it didn’t matter what color of fabric I was stitching in. 

Here is a better look at the thread I used.

There were a few spots on the blocks where I switched to the light beige thread as the blocks had a very light background.  And in these blocks I stitch on the high and low side so I stayed in the light fabric like I did in the outer border.  So for me there is no hard fast rule about stitching in the ditch, I do what looks right to my eye.  Also in this next picture you can see where I strayed from the side I was on and stitched in the darker colour, this happens and I don’t panic about it because when you look at the quilt as a whole you never see that!  There were only a few times on this quilt where I was not happy with my stitching and picked out a line or two.  So don’t stress too much when your stitching in the ditch, just take your time and don’t be over critical of it.