Bad Apple Quilt Finish

I can’t say no to a challenge.  When the Bad Ass Quilter’s Society put up the ‘BadAss Black and White Challenge’ I was one of the first thirty-eight to purchase the required skully fabric bundle from Spool and I was in!  I have to admit … I’m not a HUGE fan of skulls.  Don’t get me wrong … I have nothing against them but they are not my signature or anything (I’m more into spools of thread).  Soon, my friend Trisha Frankland is going to guest blog on here and tell you all why she thinks skulls are so amazing.  I did discover through my instagram/facebook posts about this piece that there are TONS of people that are super into skulls and because I put skulls on my quilt … they were into quilts!  I’ll take it!  So here I am – a six pack of skull fat quarters.  What to do?  First – black and white fabrics are hard enough because quilts working is all about value.  Black and white is only two values – dark and light and all these skull fabrics had them both!  So, I was looking through my pattern stash and trying to find some inspiration and then I found it! Last year a customer had given me this pattern for ‘Applefest’! This pattern is from Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine Jan/Feb 2006, No. 379 .  The paper pieced apples were big enough to get a decent skull out of the fat quarters … it was perfect!  And as soon as I told Trish my plan – she already at the quilt named for me – ‘Bad Apple’.  I paper pieced together 9 skully apples together.  Then I added some borders to stabilize them (paper piecing leaves you with lots of biased edges to work with).  Once I had the final dimensions for my 9 blocks, I sketched out how they would fit together and cut out more black and white pieces accordingly.  Now they just needed their stems, seeds and leaves to make them apples! I used Heat N Bond Ultrahold for fusing the stems and seeds so I wouldn’t have to make sure to sew them on later.   I didn’t mind doing a little decorative stitching on the leaves so I fused these with Heat N Bond Lite.  And before I knew it – the top was done!  Onto the quilting! I had fun quilting a sort of echo quilting in the apples. I chose a fun leafy design from the book 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs: Updated Second Edition with Spiral Lay-flat Binding.  Leah’s book is one of my go-to’s when I’m trying to figure out a motif.  I just flip through it, tag the pages of designs that I think would fit and then make a decision from there.  Her book lives right next to my Bernina so I can reference it often.   I added a flange to my quilt before I bound it.  I then did my signature ‘tacking’ down of the flange to create a wavy effect.  I like how you can see that effect really well in the picture above. And here it is!  My finished ‘Bad Apple Quilt’! I used a black and white crossword puzzle for the back! linking up to :  Skully Challenge Voting, Finish It Up Friday, Can I Get a Whoop Whoop, and TGIFF