Afternoon Delight - April Island Batik Borders and Bindings Challenge

Tea anyone? With the arrival of Spring comes the joy of gathering with friends during a virtual tea party due to the Corvid-19 social distancing requirements. We can still get together and enjoy a nice cup of tea for an afternoon chat and share the creative projects we are working on. I enjoyed a chat with 2 quilting friends this past week and we reminisced about the fun we had at AQS Paducah last Spring. We were looking forward to getting together again this Spring but the show has been postponed until September. We talked for a little over an hour.

During our chat we shared some of the projects we have been working on. I shared my new Island Batik Borders and Bindings Challenge Project. After the phone call I decided to call my April challenge project “Afternoon Delight”. What would we do without cell phones and video chats. If you are needing to talk to one of your quilting friends just pour yourself a cup of tea and pick up the phone and have a nice afternoon chat. It does the soul good.

Let me share with you how I created “Afternoon Delight”. It is an easy quilt to make. there are 3 simple blocks in the quilt. They are commonly used in quilt borders in many styles of quilts. I used a simple 4-Patch, a 9-Patch, and a Quarter Square Triangle block. I created rows using these blocks in an on-point setting. The design was first created in EQ8. Each quilt block is 3″ square. They are arranged in a border round robin style with a 1/2″ grey Island Batik Solid sashing in between the blocks.

Batik Fabric Selection

I wanted the Spring table topper I was designing to be the colors of Spring, so I choose the Island Batik “Forget Me Not” collection. The lovely blues and the soft buttery yellows go beautifully with my porcelain china tea set. I wanted the quilt to have a soft, delicate, scrappy look and using this Island Batik pre-cut 10″ stack collection was perfect.

I used the Island Batik “Butter” from the Basics collection and “Sky” also from the Basics collection.

As mentioned earlier I used the grey solid in the sashing.

How Prairie Points were made for the binding

Since the challenge was to include an interesting binding treatment I thought using prairie points would frame the table topper nicely. To make the prairie points I used Susan Cleveland’s Prairie Pointer tool. Making the prairie points was fast, fun, and easy with this cleaver tool. Susan has provided wonderful videos on how to use her tool with some very creative embellishment ideas.

I make 64 – 3″ prairie points and attached them to the quilt top. I layered the top with Heirloom® Premium 100% Natural Cotton batting and a Island Batik backing fabric. The top was stitched together and then turned inside out before it was quilted. This allowed the prairie points to be on the very edge of the quilt for a nice border accent treatment.

Finishing the table topper

The quilt was sewn and quilted using Aurifil white 50wt. cotton thread. To make the piecing fit nicely together I used a Schmetz 80/12 CHROME Microtex needle. These needles have a nice sharp tip which stitch perfectly through the high thread count of the batik fabric. As you can see the intersection in each little 3″ 9-patch block match up perfectly.

I quilted the quilt with a simple all over meander to give it a nice delicate feel.

My “Afternoon Delight” tablet topper finishes to 42″ x 42″. I hope you have enjoyed my Borders and Binding challenge blog.

Stay tuned because next week, I will be sharing with you a wonderful table runner home decorating project using the new American Frontier Fall 2019 collection. There will be a great give away of a fabric bundle with of the collection. I can’t wait to share it with you. Until then, I hope you enjoy a nice virtual chat with your quilty friends. Please share with them some of the other Borders and Binding challenge posts from my fellow Island Batik Ambassadors . The links to their website are available below.