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!
