Saturday, June 8, 2013

Contemporary Backsplash quilt

Okay, so this is actually a quilt I made about six months ago, but I wanted to share it here because I really like it. It's a completely original design I created after working on a home improvement project. Last spring, my husband and I updated the laundry sink area in our house. The old sink area needed plumbing updates that necessitated the addition of a false wall, plus the tile and counter was outdated and the sink itself was so shallow that anytime you turned on the water, it would just splash all over the place.

Gross.

As a part of this, project, I got to shop for new backsplash tile!! For the record, I could look at jewel-toned sheets of glass, and tile, and marble for weeks and weeks just for fun. In reality, I only got to look for a few days, until we found something we liked for the new sink area.

So that was nice and everything, but I got a little bit obsessed with looking at backsplash tile. I particularly liked the tile patterns that were different-sized rectangles. After a while, I thought to myself, "You know, I bet there's a quilt idea in here somewhere". I spent about a week coming up with the design idea in PowerPoint, and then a day or so calculating the sizes that I wanted to use.

Essentially, the quilt uses three "tile" sizes: each larger tile was a multiple of the length of the smallest tile. So,. the medium tile is 2x the length of the small tile, and the large tile is 3x the length of the small tile.

And here's how the final quilt turned out, about two months later:


Looks pretty close to my original idea, right? The only major difference is that the original idea used skinner 'tiles', and when I got to measuring the fabric, I decided that I wanted the smallest tiles to be a bit closer to squares. I quilted in the ditch around each tile, to enhance the feeling of tile and grout, and the border is random swirlies. Here's a detail shot showing the tiles close up and the quilting:


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