Island Zest Blog Hop

1/5/2025

Design Call

I have been fortunate to be on a design call for Island Batik for quite a while now. It is exciting to see what fabric collections are coming up. Drooling over the fabrics is no doubt very familiar to us all fabric lovers! I have been privileged to get these awesome sneak peaks usually a year, sometimes a year and a half before the fabrics actually hit the market and become available!

How Island Zest Journey started for me

May of 2023 was a very special month for multiple reasons. To start the month off I was teaching on a Panama Canal cruise with Stitchin' Heaven. It was a truly special cruise that left from Galveston, TX and arrived in Los Angeles, CA. Rather than flying home after the cruise, I flew to visit my sister in Virginia, followed by visiting my brother in Finland. I even made his 60th birthday party!

During my stay in Finland I got also to visit many other dear people! First, I had a special sewing day with my amazing friends, Mari and Anne along with one of their friends!

I also got to attend my 40th high school class reunion and meet many old friends that I hadn't seen in 40 years! Here we are in front of my hometown's museum wearing our graduation hats!

I visited my god mother as well! The funny thing was that she didn't initially recognize me, and was angrily saying just to go away! When she finally realized who I was we had a fun time visiting. At a tender age of 90 she even remembered my best friend who was with me and how she had met her 30 years ago in the USA! What a memory she had! Sadly, she passed away this year.

And of course I visited my parents' grave side, multiple times. Yet this time it was way harder, as it was the first time visiting this graveside with mom also being there.

Visiting Finland wouldn't be the same if I didn't visit my best friend of 56 years, Tuula, and her family!

Tuula is an avid hiker, and she lives in an idyllic place that is awesome for hikes straight from her backyard!

In addition, there were countless other wonderful meetings with other relatives and friends!

The fun begins!

So, back to what this blog post is supposed to be all about - Island Zest: It was in the middle of night on May 23rd while I was still in Finland when I got an email from Island Batik. I was asked to select my third signature collection for them. I decided to go with this fresh, beautiful collection called Island Zest. It was designed by Kathy Engle for Island Batik.

Aren't these fabrics just stunning!

As it goes with the signature collections, I need to design some quilt patterns to go with the collection. Since I was in Finland, I left the designing phase for later on.

Sometimes I design without any fabrics in mind, while other times as I start designing I want to have the fabrics on my EQ8 (Electric Quilt 8) so I can start playing with the color choices as part of the design process.

In the end, I waited to get the digital fabrics before I started the designing phase.

The digital fabrics for this delicious collection arrived in September 2023, and my designing phase began! It really is the designing phase that I love the most! It is so much fun to be able to have a play date with my computer and see what comes out!

The first design that emerged looked a lot like this one on the left. Though I ended up tweaking it later on and my final version wasn't done until I was attending Quilt Market in the end of October. My friend Ray had a hand in the final design of Sunset Paradise merging as shown on the left!

This quilt pattern is a fun one - a lot of strip-piecing first, and then popping the corners off to give an extra special touch! The placement of the two alternating blocks gives an extra special touch to this beautiful quilt. And of course, the star of this quilt is the beautiful fabrics from my signature collection!

This quilt pattern comes in three sizes - each size the layout is the same as only the size of the block varies between the sizes.

The second design for this collection came when I played with the Corner Beam and Corner Pop II tools! This quilt's name is Azina! It is a super fun quilt to make! I first made floating Corner beam units and then cut the corners off with Corner Pop II tool to get the shape I wanted to achieve.

This pattern also comes in three different sizes, so whether you are making a special quilt for a baby, or need a bigger quilt, I have you covered!

Maravilla is a pattern that I had designed long time ago. I was just waiting for the perfect fabric collection to come along! I must have thousands of designs in my EQ8 waiting for the special collection to come out and see the daylight!

What I love about this design is that it is just one simple block repeated over and over again. What changes is the color and how each block is placed in the layout!

This quilt comes in three sizes, one of them being a table runner. So if you need to give it a try how easy this quilt is to make, why don't you give a table runner a try!

Midnight Memories is a fun quilt to make. It is my first quilt pattern making Flying Geese units! It is also a design that I had created many moons ago, and I'm so happy that it is finally out using the various greens from this wonderful collection! In addition to Flying geese units, it has many hour glass units in it!

This quilt comes in twin size.

Make sure to visit all the other blogs!

I have four other amazing designers who have worked their magic and created beautiful designs using this lovely collection, so make sure to check out their blog posts:

January 5th, 2025: Raija Salomaa of Quilters' Treasure Chest
January 6th, 2025: Shelly Watson of Wiggle Creek Designs
January 7th, 2025: Tracey Stinger of The Busy Bee Quilter
January 8th, 2025: Tiffany Hays of Needle in a Hayes Stack
January 9th, 2025: Toni Raynolds of Pieced Perfection

Thank you for visiting this blog and I hope you will get a lot of inspiration visiting the other blogs as well!

Happy Quilting,
Raija

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