When the MQG announced the Riley Blake Creative Rockstar fabric challenge, I immediately knew that I wanted to participate. As silly as it sounds, I kept getting a melody stuck in my head every time I looked at the fabric and it reminds me a little of the Sneakers that I wore when I was little. These ideas eventually morphed into the quilt that is presented.

The 1986 collaboration/revival of Aerosmith’s “Walk this Way” featuring DMC Run, loosely inspired this quilt. I wanted the quilt to feel edgy and an almost a graffiti texture, but still scream rock and roll!

I use several techniques for the manufacturing of this quilt including, improvisational piecing, set in circle piecing, Bias quilting, applique, and exploiting areas of negative space. In addition to the quilting, I applied my background in engineering to place sewable LED Lights and a mini programmable circuit board, Glow in the dark thread, floss and ribbon into the quilt to have a night and daytime effect.

This fabric Challenge had some unique roadblocks for me.  Riley Blake fabric is amazing, unfortunately, the area where I live doesn’t carry the challenge fabric nor the solids. The only solution was to utilize online stores and rely on negative space to highlight the challenge fabrics. The limited supply of challenge fabric and coordinates forced me to use every scrap of fabric and create some interesting improvisational piecing. Also, working with LED’s in a quilt creates its own set of challenges, as you cannot run over the sequins with a needle. You risk breaking the needle and the entire circuit at the same time.

I created this quilt from start to finish on my domestic home sewing machine; Babylock BLR. Being a tiny sewing machine and the fact that I used two layers of wool batting made finishing this quilt particularly difficult. A walking foot and a free motion foot created the waves and texture in this quilt.