Quilted Wall Art – a Spokes Mini Quilt

I recently finished up another Spokes mini quilt in pastel Spring colours.

Quilted wall art seems to be catching my eye these days! You can see my other rainbow version of this mini quilt over here.

Fabric Choices

This Spring version of Spokes has a slight variation in the background. I knew I wanted to use plain white fabric for the appliqué on all of the blocks. Given this would be a constant I felt it gave me a licence to be a bit more scrappy with the background.

I decided to use a four-patch block for the background of each block.

The colours were chosen from my scrap bags and I went with yellow, coral, pink and lime green. I did consider baby blue instead of the green, but nothing says Spring like green.

Quilting Choices

Once my blocks were complete I spray basted and considered how I would quilt this piece. I knew I would be using straight line quilting and that it would be quite dense. This quilting style secures all the small bits of fabric and also gives the quilted wall art stiff form.

I used a quilting ruler and hera marker to mark some one inch cross hatch marks across the blocks. I had a look at the threads I had on hand and found 3 that matched very well. One was a dark golden yellow, one was pink and the last was a deep coral. In the end I felt the coral was a bit too dark.

I quilted the first one inch crosshatch grid completely in yellow. Then I went back and sewed another line between them all to make a half-inch grid.

For fun I sewed every second line with yellow and then switched to the pink thread to sew the rest. It added just a little bit of sparkle to the quilting.

Binding My Quilted Wall Art

I used some offcuts of Carolyn Friedlander wideback for my binding fabric. It is a lovely warm purple (orchid is the colour, I believe) and I love how the crosshatch pattern on the fabric mirrors the crosshatch quilting.

I find the wideback fabrics are a little stiffer than normal quilting fabric which makes it a great choice for a piece of quilted wall art. The extra rigidity helps the mini quilt keep its shape when it’s suspended.

You can also see above/below that while I used yellow/pink thread for my quilting, I used grey in my bobbin. I didn’t think the back needed any pizzaz, plus it saved me having to wind two extra bobbins. Laziness, for the win!

I machine sewed the binding to the front and then hand stitched it down at the back. It was nice to sit and hand sew for a while; I usually completely machine sew my bindings these days to save time.

So there you have it – my latest piece of quilted wall art. I like these small projects, they’re so quick to sew up. And it’s fun to swap them out and seasonally decorate. If I put some thought into fabric choices it’s possible to make a project for every season/holiday.

I’m looking forward to using this block for a long table runner as well (perhaps for Christmas?). Maybe a small rearrangement of appliqué pieces and I could make a festive snowflake-reminiscent table topper. I’ll be sure to report back with my findings!

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