Lumin Fabrics (Island Batik) Runner Up

Pitchers Boutique

Feb 207 min read

Let me start off by mentioning the name change, as I am sure all of you are wondering what I mean by Lumin Fabrics? Well, Island Batik has now branched out and become an even bigger fabric company! Lumin Fabrics " is the parent company of various fabric brands, all bringing innovative designs and creative sparks to quilters and sewers around the world. With the desire to launch a handful of additional brands, the team at Island Batik launched Lumin Fabrics as our parent company and created White Owl Textiles to serve the print market and Ecco Cotton to provide the highest quality solid fabrics." This change will bring some exciting new fabrics to the market and I can not wait to see what we, ambassadors, get to use and sew with. I obviously am excited for solids but I am over all hyped for the new and unique fabrics that are to come. Now that we have that squared away, lets continue with our normal blog post.

This month we are starting the year off with a bang and jumping in with a blog hop! This blog hope has giveaways and more giveaways and lots of beautiful runners from all the Island Batik Ambassadors.

Be sure to join the blog hop and enter the giveaway by clicking below:

This weeks collection that I was lucky enough to use is the Sunlit Garden by Jerry Khiev. This collection is full of warm green and reds with a pop of rainbow. The prints are beautiful floral and some texture stones and vines/leaves. This collection reminds me of warm Christmas seasons in California. Where you have red and green but the sun is out and the flowers are still blooming.

Our challenge was to use a Studio 180 Tool by Deb Tucker, and I of course picked a tool, and block, that I have never done before. I definitely wanted to challenge myself but also who doesn't want to make beautiful star blocks. What tool am I talking about? Well the none other than the Rapid Fire Lemoyne Star. This tool makes that perfect star with the diamonds radiating from the center. This block has always looked so challenging to me; one, because points- and we all know I can't match points in traditional blocks, but two I always thought this block was made with Y seams. Didn't you? Lastly, I am not the best with traditional blocks, so I never had the mind set to sit and actually get the pattern for a Lemoyne Star block, for some reason that always seemed so daunting.

Deb Tucker's Studio 180 Rapid Fire Lemoyne Star Tool

I pulled this beautiful collection and had the yellow fabric that came as extra (for background or backing) but I wasn't feeling it a hundred percent, but I also needed several yards as I have a 100 inch long table. Yes, I know why do I need a 100 inch table? Well you see, I love throwing get togethers, and love to have people over. My friends all know my door is always open and anyone is welcome to come over. I always want my home to feel welcoming and open to anyone; so the table is that symbol for me; a place to gather and collect together.

So, I had to dig into my pile of Lumin/Island Batik Fabrics and see what I had that was enough for this project. I found this perfect off-white fabric with the pale green leaf design. I believe I got this one with my Breezy collections that I used around this time last year. This fabric is called Eggshell. It had a perfect amount of pale green vines with circular leafs and vines that crawl all over the batik. I knew it would be a perfect background.

I did a little mock up of what I wanted it to look like and I loved this idea of a large center piece Lemoyne Star with increasing smaller stars falling away from the center. In the end the mock up looked just like a Christmas snowflake table runner.

The Deb Tucker Studio 180 Tool has the ability to make a 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4 and 3 inch blocks. I know, so many sizes! I decided I wanted to do a 12, 10, 8, 6 and 4 inch block as well as the center which I used the 12 inch measures to attempt.

The center block took some trial and error as I had to figure out how to add the second layer of diamonds, so please note the tool helps with the diamonds of the double layer star but the instructions do not come with this star design. This was trial and error on my part. I did figure it out, but it was not easy as I have said before, traditional blocks are not my forte.

Eventually the hardest part was done and now I needed to pick the fabrics and colors for all the other stars, and their sizes as well as cut and sew each piece. I did this with lots and lots of chain piecing. This made the process really easy.

Everything cut, and ready for chain piecing. Each block size is clustered together.

Using the Rapid Fire Lemoyne Star Studio 180 Tool to make cutting easy.

Once all the chain piecing is done for each round, I was able to use my amazing big Oliso iron to get these pieces all pressed.

The big Oliso iron had this job done in minutes!

Then once I had all the pieces ironed flat and pressed to the correct directions, I began to assemble each star.

Each size clustered together with their pieces ready to be sewn into stars.

Eventually I finished all the stars. Took me about 2 days to go from cutting to completed Lemoyne Star blocks (minus the entire day I spent one the big center star).

I laid everything out on my table to try and get an idea of how it would look and how I wanted to sew them together. Sadly, when I laid them all out on the table I could not get them to lay the way I wanted. However, I had made roughly two of each color way so 4 blocks in almost all the sizes, so I had plenty of blocks in each size to move around and see if I could lay them out in a way that worked, to look similar to the design I had in mind.

This was the layout I liked the best (only one side pictured).

I then got to work, doing the math for the rest of the background fabric cuts, and started to get everything sewn together. I used the white fabric in the collection as an outside boarder.

Just the touch it needed around the edge.

I then picked the Hobbs Cotton batting as I felt it was probably the best one for this project. It's also my favorite outside of the all black batting. However, I am sure you could use really any of the hobbs batting as I am sure each one would have a great reason as to what you will use the runner for. Mine usually are decorative and this runner might get placed on the back of the couch or on the fireplace in the future. We shall see.

I then used the red floral fabric as my backing fabric, this is one of the fabrics in the collection. I received just enough to use as the backing.

I then decided to use Aurifil 2021 for free motion quilting in the background areas and Aurifil 2835 in the stars. I did a combination of different free motion quilting swirls, and curves, feathers, and motifs all over the runner. This ended up taking me about 2 days to completely finish free motion quilting.

Using the Aurifil 2021 to quilt the background fabric.

The quilting is always my favorite part of making any quilt.

The Deb Tucker Studio 180 Rapid Fire Lemoyne Star tool makes the blocks less bulky and easier to quilt around. I often have issues with the center of blocks or where several seams meet, and not being able to quilt in those areas due to the bulk. However, you can see I was able to quilt right into lots of seams, with little to no issues. This tool was amazing, and the instructions really showed you how to avoid the bulk.

When the quilting was finally done. I finished the runner off with the red binding, bringing it from the back to the front, framing the entire runner perfectly.

The finished size of the runner is 92 x 25 inches. I hope you enjoy the beautiful images below and let me know below what you would have made with this collection of fabrics?