Playing with Marblehead

Jessica Toye, a member of the Kansas City Modern Quilt Guild who blogs over at Two Hens Cluckin', designed three quilts using the Marblehead Global Brights collection. The quilts will hang in our booth at Quilt Market next week, but in the meantime we're sharing them here because we think that they're fantastic and they'll provide inspiration for the Marblehead Challenge.

Q: What attracted you to the Marblehead Global Brights fabric?

Jessica: I love the way the Global Brights read as almost solids. I'm a fan of the modern quilting movement and there are TONS of solids used there. The Global Brights are such fun, happy colors that really played well together and really just spoke to me. 

Q. How did you come up with the designs?

Jessica: I wanted to create a few quilts showing various sized pieces of the fabrics. Dresser Drawers shows the biggest chunks of each fabric. Library Stacks is designed to create a quilt with a little more movement. Several of these fabrics have a flowy feel to them and I wanted to explode that idea into a quilt design. Sunset Boulevard was designed to resemble a rainbow or spectrum. 

Q. Which quilt do you like best, and why?

Jessica: Sunset Boulevard is my favorite of the three. I feel it has the best balance in composition. It is the cleanest and most dynamic design of the three. It was also the most fun to make. 

Q. What surprised you about these quilts?

Jessica: The quilting! The thread I used on all three quilts is the same color. (Superior Threads: So Fine! #50 - #421 - Marigold) It's really interesting to do so many quilts from the same materials and see the huge difference in the final outcome.

Q. Tell us a bit about the machine quilting on each quilt.

Jessica: Library Stacks is a simple meandering stitch. The piecing portion of this quilt had so much going on that a simple all over design was necessary to finish it off. 

When I was deciding how to quilt Sunset Boulevard, I was watching Angela Walter's Craftsy class, Machine Quilting Negative Space. Angela uses a tile design in her class that I really wanted to try. I thought it gave the spectrum piecing a fractured look. Almost like the rainbow of the piecing was being shattered into various pieces. Within the tiles, I used Angela's swirl design to contrast the sharp angles of the tiles and linear feel of the piecing. 

The quilting on Dresser Drawers was done in another of Angela Walter's quilting designs, her wood grain motif. My intent was to stick with the dresser idea and add a bit of motion to the quilt's appearance.