Seascape Quilt, part I

I've been drooling all over art quilts for some time now. There are quite a few on display at one of my local quilt shops and they are something to behold. They use such interesting techniques and unusual mediums, from yarn, beads, yoyos, ribbons, you name it.  I decided a while ago that I'd start one, so I drew up some ideas and decided that I wanted to do an underwater scene. I drew out the design and used my laptop to blow up the design to an appropriate size.

I want to use this quilt as a wall hanging to take up the dead space above the sofa. Hubby-to-be seemed skeptical of sea creatures in the living room, but I think it is an improvement over the Halloween Circle quilt that's currently up there, leftover from last year. I've been slowly collecting blue batiks for the background for a while, and I finally bought the last few on sale a few weeks ago. I printed out the pattern pieces and cut out the background pieces this week.

Gathered up and waiting to be cut

I took a long time picking out all of the batiks. I wanted a variety of tones in the blues and it took me quite a while to find the ones that were just right. The browns/reds are going to be along the bottom to give it a little more depth.

I'm not an artist, if you hadn't guessed.

It may be rather crude, but it's my first attempt at such a nontraditional pattern. I've made plenty of my own patterns using rulers and straight lines but curves is something entirely new to me. I think I made things a little easier for myself by deciding to forgo traditional seams and simple lay the pieces over top of one another and use a decorative stitch to hold them together, with one raw edge exposed on top, and the other underneath. Otherwise, much math would have been involved and working out the appropriate seam allowances for quilts has proven not to be my strongest suit.

Right now it is just another one of my on-going projects. The homespun quilt has precedence over all the others right now, particularly because my new toy, the Flynn Multi-Frame, has arrived! I tore it out of the box as soon as it arrived, but I don't currently have the space to play with it. Sadly, I was forced to pack it all back up and stick it into my storage closet until I move next month.