Crazy Quilts with Aurifil & Island Batik

All month long, Island Batik & Aurifil are crazy for crazy quilts! Each Island Batik ambassador was sent one of Aurifil's Color Builder sets and challenged to feature those threads in a crazy quilt project.  The 2022 Color Builder sets honor plants from the rain forest and highlights Aurifil's variegated threads.  I was sent the Stinking Corpse Lily set.  Despite the pungent name, the set features beautiful threads in sort of a coral colorway. The set includes 4250 Flamingo, a lovely light variegated thread, 4668 Strawberry Parfait, a variegated thread with lengths of darker coral added to the lighter shades, and 2435 Peachy Pink, a solid color thread that looks exactly as it is named.  

The products featured in this post were given to me by Island Batik, Aurifil, Hobbs, and Schmetz.  

I knew that for crazy quilt, contrast was going to be key.  I decided to pair the Stinking Corpse Lily threads with a strip pack of Playful Purples.  It is no secret that purple is my favorite color, so I wanted to make something that I would get to see or use regularly, so I could revel in all the beautiful shades of purple.  When I was looking for smaller projects, I came across a tutorial for a covered composition notebook by the Quilt Rambler, who happens to be a former Island Batik ambassador.  

 

I made two notebook covers.  For the first, I essentially did the crazy quilting as I went.  I started by layering white solid as my foundation, which does not show in the final project, with a layer of Hobbs Thermore batting.  Thermore is a thin polyester batting that I have really come to love.  It's fabulous for small projects. Then I randomly picked two bits of fabric from Playful Purples and sewed them together.  

After rolling over the seam with my seam roller, I picked one of the three Stinking Corpse Lily threads and a fancy stitch from my sewing machine and stitched the decorative stitch across the seam.  I kept adding pieces of purple and using more stitches until I filled a piece slightly larger than needed for the notebook cover.  Each time, I picked which of the three threads I thought would look best.

For the second cover, I did a few things differently.  First, I drew dogwood blossoms on a four pieces of fabric to include. It's spring, so dogwoods are blooming here in North Carolina!  I sewed all the playful purple fabrics together first, rather than adding decorative stitches as I went--it certainly was much faster that way!   I also chose a single stitch, one I particularly liked in the first piece, and I only used the variegated Flamingo thread.  

I started the project with a brand new Schmetz microtex chrome needle, and it stitched all the decorative stitches beautifully.  I think both have the fun look of a crazy quilt.

Once I had all the crazy stitches done, I trimmed the pieces and got down to making the notebook covers.  I had some yardage of Thistle, the lightest of the Playful Purples, that I used for the lining.  The tutorial calls for ribbon, but I made my own using some of the strips pressed into quarters.  The tutorial was fairly easy to follow, and I really like that it includes a small vinyl pocket for pens.

 

It's fun to have an occasion and an excuse to use the decorative stitches on my machine.  A few years ago I made myself a stitch reference of all my machine's stitches --stitched in Aurifil thread, of course!  It was a handy reference to have for this project, as it reminded me what each stitch looks like when it is stitched out.  I used a lot of decorative stitches in two previous ambassador projects: in January 2020 I made a crazy quilted machine cover for the Let's Get Scrappy challenge, and in October 2020 I used decorative stitches as a form of thread painting for my Funky Flower in that year's Aurifil challenge. It was fun to have a crazy quilt challenge, and I'm pleased with my playfully purple notebooks!