Light & Dark, a Relay For Life Raffle Quilt

Each year for the past few years my Aunt G. and i have made and donated a quilt to our bank's Relay For Life team raffle. Our family has been touch by cancer in many forms, Lung Cancer, Hodgkin's Lymphoma, Brain Cancer, and a few more. Making the quilt for raffle each year is our way of trying to help raise money to keep the research going untill cures for all types of cancer are found

In past years we have gone with more traditional patterns but not so tradition fabrics. Brights & batik fabrics are our fabrics of choice, and the tickets have always sold well. This year however we wanted to try something a bit less traditional so set out to try and find some inspiration for a new pattern. I had seen a few quilts on Instagram made from Half Square Triangle blocks that i thought would work well with the batik fat quarters that already purchased. I was pretty sure i could come up with a quilt without directions but i was lucky enough to find a free pattern online that was very very close to what i wanted to do.

Half Square Triangle Fun is a free downloadable pattern from Connecting Threads & was designed by Mari Martin. I used her basic direction on size of blocks and so on. I wanted to make the quilt larger than the original pattern so i used 24 Fat Quarters and 4 yards of a background fabric to enough blocks. I had a few left over that i will make a throw pillow with later on. When it came time to layout the quilt on the design wall things took a little bit of a turn!

i had in my head that i wanted the quilt to look almost exactly like the photo in the pattern only off center by a few rows. I started the layout high up on the design wall and i had to stand on a chair to reach it. I didn't look at the pattern photo but i knew i had it perfectly right... WRONG! I twisted on block the wrong direction and didn't even notice until i had over half of the quilt laid out on the wall! But i liked it, actually i loved the off kilter look way better than the symmetrical look of the original pattern so i stuck with it!







When it came time for quilting i picked out two different threads to blend in as much as possible. I used both Essential Pro and Superior Lava threads. The Pro thread went for the Wishbone design in the background and the Lava was used on the Batik fabrics with a simple" U Turn" quilting design.



Tickets went on sale this week, keep your fingers crossed that it sells lots of tickets!