Kirigami Flake Block – A Closer Look at My Method

The Project QUILTING Challenge ‘My Favorite Color‘ was a difficult one for me.  I’m not really a ‘white’ person…it makes me nervous.  I don’t want to get it dirty and ruin the whole thing (although I do realize you could technically stain ANY fabric on a quilt…but white just makes me extra nervous I guess).  I was so not into it, in fact, that I challenged my mother-in-law, Diane, aka, the challenge giver to do this challenge as well…she obviously didn’t have a problem with it…see her quilt HERE.

After thinking over it for a bit, I did finally come up with something that I had been wanting to try for awhile.  It wasn’t super ‘outside the square’ for me but it’s something I wanted to do and it was a great opportunity for me to try it.

In November I read the book ‘The Aloha Quilt’ by Jennifer Chiaverini. Ever since then I wanted to try to make a Hawaiian-like quilt. I realize what I made isn’t one but it was inspired by their technique.

I gave my daughter, Capri, a Kirigami day by day calendar for Christmas 2012 because she loves to use her scissors to cut things. Well…we didn’t cut everyday so I tried all the different cuts to decide what to do for my quilt pattern. After practicing a bit I finally decided on the one you can see on my pillow.  I made two pillows – one in purple, my old favorite color and one in turquoise, my newest favorite color.

After trying all the folds in Capri’s calendar I finally decided on doing the Starburst Fold for my quilt block.   The first thing I did was fuse on iron on fusible to the backside of my fabrics.  

Next, I folded a piece of paper using the starburst folding technique and drew my design idea on it.   The tallest points were too tall for my prepared fused fabrics so I trimmed them down so it would fit nicely on the pillow. With the purple ‘practice block’ I did all the folding, sketching, and cutting right onto the fusible…it was way too thick to do that and my scissors just couldn’t handle it.  I just didn’t get the details I wanted…which is why I switched to drawing it on a separate piece of paper and then tracing the pattern onto my fused side of the fabric.  

Using my smallest rotary cutter I was able to cut out the intricate snowflake pattern I had created.

  I really liked taking pictures of the piece as it was getting cut out. You can see the pattern emerging…like a sculpture.

Here’s the final cut out fabric piece.   Next, I peeled the paper off leaving the fusible there (see it’s shiny…)

Next, I placed the fusible cut out kirigami flake and ironed it onto my kona white fabric.  (Since I’m working on two white quilts at the moment I recently stocked up on this…)

  Once it was fused I sandwhiched it together with another piece of white fabric and a layer of batting.  Using a turquoise metallic thread I blanket stitched around my whole snowflake.  It was slightly tedious but I really like how it looked in the end. Originally I thought I’d make this just into a small wall hanging.  But then realized it would make a really cute pillowcase.  I bound it mostly with white but with a few chunks of my turquoise stripe just to add a bit more movement to the piece. 

My final project used just two fabrics – very rare for me.  I’m really happy with the drama that was created with this and I will probably do this technique again in the future.

Finished size; 12.5″ x 12.5″

Oh – and here’s a pictuer of my ‘trial pillow…you can see it definitely was not as ‘crisp’ as the other one…definitely cut on seperate paper and trace.

All the Project QUILTING Quilts have been submitted – head over to the flickr site to see the amazing work done!  I’ll be posting the prize winners tomorrow and showing ‘closer looks’ at all the projects throughout the week.