I'm Working on a Project: SAQA Auction Quilts

Tuesday, February 15, 2022

SAQA Auction Quilts

My first new quilt of this year features a bunch of boxelder bugs crawling all over it. It's for one of the calls for our art quilt group 4 Common Corners, and I'll blog about it separately. But in the process of cutting out the bugs using my silhouette cutter, I realized that I had all these "bug frames" leftover after I peeled out the fabric bug shapes. You can see the cut lines in the picture below.

I didn't want to waste the frame bits, especially since they cut fairly cleanly, so I grabbed a couple of them and decided to use them for my annual SAQA auction quilts. Every spring, SAQA invites people to submit a very small quilt (6" x 8") to their Spotlight Auction which is held in conjunction with the annual conference. And then in the fall, we all submit 12" x 12" quilts for the annual benefit auction.

The bugs and frames were backed with fusible so I grabbed the frames and fused them down to some handpainted pinkish orange fabric leftover from my Glycocalyx project and started to "decorate". The auction quilts are always a fun time to play with interesting stuff so I got out my iron-on fusible foil, and my markers and paint pens. My mom gave me some of the foil while I was home and she was de-stashing. I added it to my existing foil collection and in the process was prompted to use it. I haven't done any foiling in many years, not since making some small Christmas light tree quilts back in 2014 and 2016. It was fun to use, and I love the shiny reflectiveness of the foil. It's hard to see in the pictures, but the gold and teal are foil.

These also served as the first "art quilts" I quilted on my new sit-down longarm. The quilting went really smoothly, and I even quilted the backgrounds with metallic thread which is always tricky.

This is the finished 12x12.

And this is the finished quilt for the Spotlight Auction. Again, it's very small (6x8), really just like a slightly oversized postcard.

Each of the bugs is quilted slightly differently, and it was so fun to make them. It had been a long time since I had fun quilting and sewing so these were a delight to work on. The bug shapes were a great blank slate for doodling with color and quilting.