Ripples Cubed in the Plum Pudding Blog Tour

When Sherry from Powered by Quilting invited me to participate in a blog tour for her newest signature collection from Island Batik, I plugged the digital fabric swatches she sent into a design I'd been toying with on and off in EQ.  I liked what I saw and I couldn't pass up the chance to make Ripples Cubed in her Plum Pudding fabric.

Ripples Cubed was designed with large pieces specifically to showcase pretty prints.  I think it certainly did the trick for the Plum Pudding batiks. These are not my usual colour choices, but I couldn't resist the mix of rich jewel tones and more subdued accents.  There's a great variety of textures in the prints as well.  

I shared some of the quilting process in this post last month.  I used Westalee quilting rulers to quilt the designs in the darker triangles.  I also outline quilted inside the medium triangles to define those shapes a little.  I think it makes it look a little more polished.  It's difficult to make out the quilting in the center squares and triangles in the photo.  It looks better in person, and I'm pleased with how it dressed up the blocks. 

I let the quilt sit a couple of days while I pondered how to quilt the background and the plain squares.  You can see in the photo above that I quilted multiple echoes of the square-on-point shape that appears in the background.  As I worked my way to the center with the echo, I realized I could change the angle of the lines just a little bit in the innermost echo so that it extends the designs in the small print squares into a single design.

I thought about practicing different designs in the plain squares, but in the end decided to keep things clean and simple, just like the piecing. Well, I was also running out of time, and the straight lines were quick!  To tie this quilting to the rest, I first quilted a frame 1" inside the sides of the square, just as I had quilted a 1" frame inside the large triangles.

I finished off the quilting with straight line quilting all the way around in the border, then added a contrasting binding.  

If you're wondering where the quilt's name came from, I can say part of the design reminded me of ripples radiating out from a stone dropped in water.  I added the cubed part because the shapes are squared, not rounded like true ripples.  And yes, it's 2-dimensional, so would be "squared" rather than cubed, which would imply 3 dimensions, but there are 3 ripples, and a superscript 3 is read a "cubed"....I admit, the name's provenance is kind of convoluted, but this is a quilt pattern, not a math textbook, so just go with it, OK?  :)

If you'd like to make your own version  of Ripples Cubed, the pattern is now available as a PDF download in my Etsy shop.  Many thanks to Tammy H, Kathi Kivi, Sandie L and Pamela Dee Deringer for testing the pattern. I'll share my testers' lovely and varied versions later this week to provide inspiration.  Let's just say, there isn't a limitation on fabric genre for this one!

To see more projects made with Sherry's beautiful collection, visit other stops on the blog tour this month.  Links are included below.

• June 8 - Powered By Quilting
• June 9 - Canuck Quilter <<<---YOU ARE HERE
• June 10 - Storied Quilts
• June 11 - Katie Mae Quilts
• June 12 - Paleofish Designs
• June 13 - Devoted Quilter
• June 14 - Desert Bloom Quilting
• June 15 - Everyday Stitches
• June 16 - Lemon Tree Snippets
• June 17 - Tuning My Heart
• June 18 - Slice of Pi Quilts
• June 19 - Love to Color My World
• June 20 - Anja Quilts
• June 21 - Websterquilt
• June 22 - Sew Joy Creations
• June 23 - ------
• June 24 - Dizzy Quilter
• June 25 - Powered By Quilting