Sandia Quilt by Initial K Studio

In May 2020 I was still exploring Kristi Schroeder‘s book Southwest Modern. I was still on track with my monthly quilt projects and secretly planned to make all the quilts from her book. 🙂

Having started the year with her Rustic Quilt, I decided to focus on the Sandia Quilt for May 2020. It reminded me of Islamic geometry another passion of mine. It seemed to be a modern interpretation of Islamic star patterns using colors that are very earthbound and warm. 

I simply loved it and it was supposed to become my personal quilt. Can you believe that until this point I had never actually made a quilt for myself? So, this was supposed to be it!

Foundation Paper Piecing for my May Quilt Project

The Sandia quilt is based on a simple star design using the foundation paper piecing technique. I had tried out this technique several times before, so there was not so much new to learn here for me.

Usually, you print on specific foundation paper piecing paper, but it is impossible to get in Qatar. I try to avoid ordering anything made from paper whenever possible. It is heavy and shipment costs are insanely high compared to the actual price of the product. And as you need a lot of paper and usually have a lot of paper waste it would be simply too expensive to go for this special paper for a complete quilt.

So, I decided to give it a go with printing the pattern on normal printer paper.

It is a bit tricky as you cannot see through the paper that easily. I had manually transferred patterns on tracing paper before which was easier to sew. But doing this takes just too long to make it feasible for a whole quilt. 

So I was pretty happy that normal printer paper worked out fine in the end and my star spike blocks were prepared in no time. 🙂

Assembling the Quilt Top

The only difficult part about this quilt for me was putting the colored star spikes together in the right order to make the stars. I really would love to have a quilt design wall for such purposes. It would be so handy to lay out all the blocks neatly and take them down piece by piece to sew the rows together.

But not having a proper craft room means that this is not an option at the moment and will remain a dream for the future. But I always make a little mental note when putting quilt tops together that it would be an amazing thing to have.

My only option is to lay all blocks out on the floor. Usually, I cannot do this in my room as there is not enough space. So I have to move all my blocks to the living room and lay them out there. I can also not leave them there and go back to the sewing machine to sew row by row together. No way that can work with several cats in the house. They are always very curious and think they need to inspect my latest quilt project. 🙂

Quilting the Sandia Quilt

Once the Sandia quilt top was assembled I quickly prepared for quilting it as well. Similar to the Rustic quilt the quilting in the book is just straight lines. It took some time nevertheless as they are much closer together than the ones I used for the Rustic quilt.

But, once it was done and the dark red binding was attached, I hung it outside for a photo shoot by the best quilter’s husband. 🙂

(Un)fortunately, my mother-in-law had a very nice view of the quilt from inside the house and she loved it. The colors were striking and as she loves fall colors these warm red tones just suited her very well. So instead of making this quilt for myself, it became a present for her… 😉

But can you have a better excuse for ordering new fabrics and making more quilts? I think you can’t. What excuses do you use to justify buying fabrics for your loved ones?