Aurifil Artisan Challenge: April 2022

Happy Earth Day!

For the April Aurifil Artisan challenge, Aurifil teamed up with Robert Kaufman and Karen Nyberg to get a handful of Earth Views fat quarters into all the hands of Aurifil Artisans.

For this challenge, I laser cut a world map from a purchased SVG drawing. I bonded Steam-a-Seam Lite 2 to the fabric layer prior to laser cutting, and then bonded the laser cut applique world map to a background piece. Because I received four fat quarter cuts, I was able to prepare two distinct pieces, each with two fabric combos.

After laser cutting and bonding the layers together, I loaded up the pieces on my long-arm for computerized quilting. For the first piece, I computerized quilted horizontal lines at 1/4". For the second piece, I had a different design planned via computerized quilting, but I was having a bit of a longarm encoder issue, so I switched to human-driven (me) longarm quilting in a small dense pebble pattern. In both cases, I used Aurifil 50wt thread on my longarm. My longarm doesn't always love 50wt thread depending on the speed at which I'm quilting, but it worked out well here!

I wanted to finish the pieces a little different since these will hang in two kid rooms. I found perfectly fitting matted frames and mounted both in the frames.

I'm really happy with how this quick project turned out! The lighter color mapped surprised me in that it looks like a faded paper map. The darker color map reminds me of seeing city light views from an airplane. It was fun to experiment in a couple different ways with the same design.

Make sure to check out the remaining Earth Views available with this new fabric line, and as always, the wide spectrum of Aurifil thread offerings!