Finished this quilt yesterday. I had a jellyroll of a set of batik strips (Moda) which I’ve had in my stash for a while – when I came across a photo of a quilt like this I thought it a good way to use up that roll. Easy to construct, essentially, the small blocks are a variant of a log cabin, the joining sashing includes blocks of the print fabric and then the outer sashing is solid (although I could have added in small blocks to join up the big squares. In any case, the real challenge was what to do about quilting this quilt because the large blocks were 14″ x 14″ and the largest design I can create in my Grand Dream Hoop is 13.5″ x 13.5″. I set up a design that consisted of 4 smaller elements (there are two difficulties using the large turnable hoop – 1. the design shouldn’t cross over the middle, it won’t likely align when the hoop is turned, and 2. because of the size and weight of the quilt there is drag on this large hoop and so the two sides are never perfectly aligned).

The left side of the design replicates the right side. I wanted the design to embroider the background center block, not leave it empty. For the sashing I created a design using one of the machine quilting stitches and fit it within the 360 x 200 hoop so that it would fill the length of the sashing pieces, and then a small single-run flower for the corners of the sashing.

Here’s the quilt back:

A pieced strip using the small amount of leftovers from the strips plus a 2 1/2″ strip of some fabrics that I thought blended with the original fabrics.

The binding used six strips from the original roll.