Project Quilting 12.4: Snail's Trail

This week's Project Quilting Challenge 12.4 was to create a project inspired by the snail’s trail quilt block. As usual, inspiration for my project came at a snail's pace! Inspiration finally struck Saturday morning, just as I was getting ready to teach a full-day online workshop. My idea would need to percolate until much later that evening when I could finally get started. Using an 18" square of freezer paper, I drafted a snail's trail block to use as a template for outline stitching the squares and triangles onto a quilt sandwich.

Once the skeleton of a snail's trail block was stitched out, it was time to paint and play using a variety of surface design products and techniques.

Small pieces of extra tacky Scotch/3-M Rough Surface Painter's Tape were used to mark off two of the spirals. In the unmarked spirals, a stipple pattern was painted using Fantastix and Jacquard's Super Sparkle Lumiere, capturing the silvery slime trails left behind a traveling snail. 

In the opposite spirals, escargot spirals were painted using Lumiere in Bright Gold, Metallic Bronze, Pearlescent Turquoise, and Halo Blue Gold.

These painted motifs were outline stitched using Superior's Dark Grey Omni thread prior to binding the quilt using a coordinating striped fabric.

As I stepped back to take a photo of my quilted and bound project around 1:30/2 AM, I felt underwhelmed. Yes, it was pretty late/early and I was very tempted to just call it finished and head to bed. But instead, I reached for two Uniball Signo metallic pens (gold and silver) to embellish the various snail shells and slimy trails.

These metallic markings added wonderful energy and interest to my now-finished quilt.

Escar-WHOA!!, Finishes 17" x 17"

Of course I couldn't resist using a Kaffe Spiral Shells print for the quilt back!

Be sure to head on over to check out all the entries made for this week's Project Quilting Snail's Trail Challenge!