Falling for Accuquilt – an Island Batik Challenge

One of the boxes from Island Batik contained an Accuquilt cutter, 8″ Cube dies, and 2.5″ strips. In addition, we were given a special set called North Carolina BoB.

A BoB is a Block on Board. It is all the pieces of a particular block on one die board. It makes cutting easy peasy but I would caution one against trying to cut more than one block at a time. It’s easy to forget how many you’re meant to be cutting and lose pieces in the process. Ask me how I know. 🤪

Now the North Carolina Star block can be a bit intimidating because it has so many Y-seams. While the Accuquilt BoB for this block does help with the cutting to create simple seams, it also nearly doubles the total number of seams, from 33 to 53, so one has to weigh the advantage of straight seams over the bulk of additional ones.

Island Batik Ambassadors were given free rein to use the block pieces to create anything they wished. It wasn’t necessary to assemble as the North Carolina block and we were encouraged to use autumnal colours.  I was happy to do the North Carolina block as I really liked it. Using autumnal colours was another matter because these are not the typical colours in my palette. However, I had some lovely pieces of the Blushing Garden left over from the September challenge. Combined with some of the other fabrics that I’d received from Island Batik, I was able to pull together a lovely combination.

I used the following Island Batik fabrics from the Blushing Garden collection, just out last month:

These Island Batik Blenders, available all of the time:

And this Island Batik from the Holiday at Home collection that came out in May:

I used Electric Quilt 8 to play around with colourways. The North Carolina Star block that is in the EQ8 library is called Star of North Carolina variation and is slightly different. I use EQ8 a good bit for design so it was easy to make the necessary changes to make it the same as the North Carolina star block of Accuquilt.

As we could make whatever we wished, I decided to use this free pattern from Island Batik Partner, By Annie.

The project bag finishes at 11″ x 13″.  As the block finishes at 12″, I needed to add a border to the sides and add a bit more to the front border to adjust. Using Aurifil 50wt helped to keep the seams as flat as possible and a new Schmetz needle made piecing a breeze.

I made two blocks and put them on my longarm at the same time. layered with Soft ‘n Stable, another By Annie product that I had in my stash.

I quilted them in the ditch with 40wt Aurifil and Aurifil monofilament thread. There were some areas that were a bit of a challenge because of the bulk but my APQS Millennium took it in stride. Once quilted, I was able to assemble the project bags pretty quickly.

As always, a big thank you goes to Island Batik for providing all of these gorgeous fabrics, along with their industry partners, Accuquilt, Aurifil, and Schmetz for providing great tools to work with.

Be sure to check out all of the other Ambassadors who will have some amazing projects this month.

Happy Quilting!