Zoomed In Quilt and Pattern Release

Today I get to share my Zoomed In quilt and pattern! The pattern is now listed in my Etsy shop, with the PDF available right away and the printed pattern listed as a preorder that will ship once they arrive from the printer.

I love flower applique quilts and this great, big, bold flower is so much fun. It's perfect for showing off beautiful fabrics, like the Watermark ones I used. I'm always a sucker for blue fabrics and for tone-on-tone fabrics, so Watermark by Tammie Green for Riley Blake Designs was really calling my name.

My friend Michelle named this quilt (that's at least three she has named, now!) because she said it feels like we're looking at the zoomed in picture of the corner of a much larger quilt. I had grand plans of taking it to the beach for pictures because a quilt made with Watermark fabrics and a background called Sand Dollar needed to be photographed at the beach...but life had other plans. With the time change, I'm now working through pretty much all the daylight hours, I finished the quilt on Tuesday evening and it needed to be posted here on Friday morning, so indoor pictures it is.

Zoomed In finishes at 48" square and it stitched up super fast 😊

I cut my applique pieces using my rotary cutter, with two fabrics stacked together so I cut two at a time. I considered stacking three, but I feel like I lose the precision when I'm tracing a template with three stacked, so I stuck with two. I used to cut all my applique shapes individually with scissors, until I started garment sewing and watched people cut out clothing pieces by tracing around their paper patterns with rotary cutters. I never even thought of doing that, lol. I think I assumed you had to have something sturdy like a ruler in order to use the cutter. 

Lots of times I only stitch around my applique shapes with the quilting, but this time I chose to go around them all with a zig zag stitch, using Aurifil 50 wt Very Dark Navy (2785).

When it came time for the quilting, I didn't know how I wanted to quilt the Watermark fabrics, so I started with Aurifil 2311 for the background. I stitched around the flower, then echoed that about ½" away, then echoed it again about ¼" away. 

The about is an important word, as there is plenty of variation in the echo stitching.

After outlining and echoing the flower, I stitched a flower meander in the background. I started out stitching it kind of densely...

But somewhere along the line, it got a whole lot looser. The best I can say about the flower meander quilting is that it is consistently inconsistent! In the overall view, though, it's not really noticeable, which is yet another reminder that the imperfections we see as we're working on our quilts are not so bad when we step back a bit.

Once I started moving out from the flower block, I outlined the blue borders, and kept going with the flower meander. I really liked how the back was looking with nothing in the thin borders, so I decided to leave them unquilted. It seems to be becoming a trend for me lately to leave parts of my quilts unquilted.

I love how the flower looks on the back!

And here's the whole back 😍

Stitching the label on is such a tiny step, but it's a super satisfying one!

Go to my Etsy shop to pick up your copy of Zoomed In. It's available for the introductory price now through November 17th.

Buy the PDF Zoomed In pattern

PREORDER the printed Zoomed In pattern

I'm linking with TGIFF, Can I Get a Whoop Whoop, NTT, Finished (or not) Friday and Beauties Pageant.