Introducing my newest quilt, Starburst in Teal, created as my January (and first) project for Island Batik. I have had such fun working with these beautiful fabrics, especially as they're in my most favourite colour palette.

The January challenge for Island Batik ambassadors was to create a 'Step by Step' quilt. It is a gradation style quilt using a beautiful bundle of fabrics. 

I decided to separate the fabrics into two families - blue and green. The design "Starburst" was a pattern I created a number of years ago for a magazine publication, but was only as a cushion size in that instance. It was fun to work the original pattern into a quilt size project. 

Normally, when making a quilt, it's easier to make all of the blocks first and then put them together at the end... but in this instance, I found it more efficient to create the quilt row by row, as I went. 

As soon as a row was finished, I pressed it and sewed it to the previous row... it was when I finally had made half the quilt top that I could see that it was going to work out just as I'd hoped (and imagined).

Once the quilt top was complete, I sandwiched, basted then quilted in the ditch along the blocks to make four arrow shapes pointing towards the centre of the quilt. 

To finish, I decided that a little more big stitch hand quilting was necessary - I love adding a little bit of hand stitching to my projects. I chose three Aurifil 12wt thread colours to add lines of stitches to emphasise the "arrow" ditch quilting. 

I'm very pleased with this new quilt and will share my pattern at a later date (when I have time to write it up properly).