Bathtub Gin Quilt

I made this quilt using the new Sizzix 8" tumbler die and Bari J.'s Splendor 1920.  Since the fabric evokes the 1920's, I named my quilt "Bathtub Gin."  There's no other reason...it just seemed like a fun name. 

I thought that the large tumbler shape was a great way to really show off the fabrics in this line since they didn't get chopped up very much.  It also turned out to be a very efficient use of fabric.  I used a fat quarter set of both colorways, 20 fat quarters total, and used nearly every bit.  If you fold a fat quarter in quarters and run it through the Big Shot Pro, you can cut 4 tumblers.  

Instead of laying the prints out randomly, I grouped the prints in pairs to make sort of elongated hexagonal shapes.  The rows alternate between the two colorways.  I did find that the Grandeur Mist print in the Exuberance colorway was too close in color to the Elegance colorway so I removed that print and exchanged it for Nighttime shaded cotton.

I quilted with a mustard colored thread in my bobbin exclusively.  I changed the top thread a little bit though. For all the Elegance colorway rows, I used a mustard thread for the quilting and used basic swirl quilting pattern.  Since that was pretty dense, I used a wavy line for the Exuberance colorway rows, spaced about a 1/2" apart.  When the fabric had a lot of cream in it, I changed to a cream thread.  In the two navy shapes, I felt I needed to use a navy thread but feared that no matter how much I tried, the tension might not be perfect enough to pull that off with a mustard bobbin thread.  I changed to straight line quilting for those sections and it worked.

I like the way the alternating sections of dense and sparse quilting look on the back.  I used Pure Elements Honey for the backing along with a pieced strip of 2" squares left from cutting the tumblers.

The binding is Pure Elements Tile Blue, a pretty peacock blue sort of shade.

This picture shows the texture nicely, my favorite part I think!

The completed quilt is a nice lap size, 62" x 63."