Staff Quilt Challenge: A Haiku Quilt

This is the seventh in our series of staff projects created for the Spoonflower Staff Quilting Challenge. 

Hello from Team Craft Revolution! We are Katie, Stephanie and Sharon. 

At our first meeting I thought it would be fun to create a haiku about Spoonflower and base our quilt design on that haiku. After writing 10 or so haikus (mainly inside jokes about working at Spoonflower), there was our winner:

spoonflower is best

fabric designers unite

craft revolution

Once that was settled, we set about designing our fabric. Our haiku would be the focal point, of course. For the rest of the quilt, textures based on various crafting mediums (cross-stitching, crocheting, knitting, and quilting) would reflect our haiku inspiration. We wanted a bold color palette that included coral pink, navy blue, bright orange, and a golden yellow against a textured, neutral background.

In late January Katie showed us her initial design, which was quite amazing. Lots of different textures, layering effects, using the colors we liked.

After a few design edits, we ordered our Fat Quarters and Swatches of our design on different fabrics. After seeing the results we decided on the Linen Cotton Canvas, with backside and binding printed on Basic Combed Cotton. The final size of the quilt ended up being 45 inches across and 2 yards long.

After ironing we cut the batting to size and carefully arranged it on our bottom layer, then lined up our top piece. 

Pin-basting the quilt layers took us a good 25 minutes! 

We planned out the stitching on our baby quilt mock-up using color coded Sharpies. 

Stephanie and Katie shared initial machine-sewing duties while Sharon DJ’d and blogged the proceedings. Music is important to productivity, right?

We all helped do the next step, which involved hand-embroidering part of our haiku and cross-stitching triangles, lines, crosses, and French knots all along our quilt. Katie was super enthusiastic about this. She loves to hand-embroider!

The final step was to iron, cut, and sew the navy striped binding to finish our quilt.

We ended up with a fabulous quilted haiku homage to all of the revolutionary crafters out there!