Paint The Town Red {Modern May with Island Batik}

This is my third year as an Island Batik Ambassador, and thus my third modern quilt challenge month. The first two years, I knew exactly what I wanted to make and what techniques to use -- the first year I made my Ombre Everest wall hanging, the second year I made my 30 Pearls wall hanging.

Rather than designing something entirely new, I decided that what I wanted to do was to use Cheryl and Paige's Modern Plus Sampler pattern. I didn't join in during their quilt along and was feeling major FOMO when their quilt parade started, so I figured the best way to fight FOMO was to drink the Kool-Aid and join in, albeit a little late!

So what am I going to do for my quilt? Paint the town red! (And orange, and maybe yellow too!)

My plan for this quilt is to have a very warm quilt using these batiks and also using the white, grey, and black solid batiks as the "neutrals" for the pattern. I'm going to skip the applique and paper pieced blocks to make only the traditionally pieced blocks. The quilt will be built from the center out, with the darkest reds and oranges used first and moving to lighter colors as the quilt grows.

The center most five blocks are striped double plus blocks. For these blocks, I used white as my background/solid, and used two shades of red and one shade of range for the piecing. I modified the piecing directions for these blocks to be able to strip piece as many of the block units as possible. First came the center little plus blocks:

Then I strip pieced the stripes:

And chopped up my stripes:

My units laid out and prepped for sewing into blocks:

And all five blocks completed:

The next set of blocks will be the smaller plus blocks that surround these five blocks. I'll be using the black solid and the yellow and white dot batik for those blocks.

What are your sewing plans for this weekend?

Sharing at Needle and Thread Thursday!