For March 2024 the Island Batik challenge was “It’s All Up to You!”.

I’ve been wanting to make a modern quilt with arrow blocks for some time and this was my chance to do so using Island Batik fabrics.

While I’ve seen many quilts with arrow blocks online, I couldn’t find any instructions for the type of arrow block I wanted to make so… I asked my hubby (who is better at math than me) to help me design these blocks. They’re easy to make – once you understand the math.

Look for an upcoming YouTube video tutorial on making the arrow blocks I used in this quilt.

Now that I knew how to make the arrow blocks, I needed to choose fabrics for them. I decided to use a triadic colour scheme of orange, aqua, and green and then threw in one arrow in yellow for an accent. I had several precut packages of Island Batik Stash Builders (5” x WOF strips) and was able to pick the fabrics for my arrow blocks from them. These Stash Builders had 2.8 yards of fabric and included Island Batik Foundations Blender fabrics in lots of vibrant colours.

When making this quilt, I wanted to have the arrow blocks scattered throughout the quilt with lots of negative space in between them in which to quilt new-to-me motifs. While you know that Island Batik have amazing batik fabrics, you might not know that they also have solid fabrics. I just happened to have some beautiful white Island Batik yardage which worked perfectly as my background and made the arrow blocks really pop!

I recently received several different battings from Hobbs Batting (a sponsor of the Island Batik Ambassador program) and one of them was their Bleached White 80/20 batting. I knew that this pure white batting would be perfect for this quilt due to the large amount of white fabric I used in the quilt top.

I spent some time playing with the arrangement of the arrow blocks and, once I had decided on the block layout, I could then fill in the empty spaces with Island Batik white fabric. This allowed for lots of negative space in which to quilt some fun motifs.

Due to the size of the arrow blocks (6” x 9”), I needed to do some quilting in each of them. I chose threads to match each of the Island Batik fabrics in each arrow block and did some straight line ruler quilting on each of the arrows. That was fairly simple but there was still a lot of negative space that needed to be filled!

I decided to add some “ghost” arrows to break up the large areas of white Island Batik fabric in the background. I then added ¼” ruler quilting inside each ghost arrow to decrease the space that needed to be quilted inside these arrows.

So far, so good…but there was still all that beautiful Island Batik white fabric that was crying out for some quilting. After lots of sketching and thinking, I decided to add overlapping spirals in the background and added some continuous squares and rectangles around the fabric arrows. I liked this look and then had to decide what quilt motifs to add inside the ghost arrows.

This took much more thinking and sketching and I finally decided to break up the interior with rows of ¼” spaced vertical lines and then stitch freehand clamshells in the arrow shaft and head.

I used an Island Batik Neutral, Egg White, for my backing fabric. I loved the subtle blend of delicate colours in this fabric. I thought about stitching together the remaining Stash Builder strips to create a pieced backing but I decided to save these for future projects.

I added a label and some binding using the Island Batik white fabric and the quilt was done!

I called this quilt “Creative Directions”: some of the arrows are vertical or horizontal while the ghost arrows are going off on angles. I never approach things in a straight forward manner like the Island Batik fabric arrow blocks in the quilt. My thinking tends to wander and deviate from the normal path. I see my mind resembling the "ghost" arrows in quilting, angled and not aligned in a vertical or horizontal manner. The good part about this unconventional thinking is that I come up with lots and lots of ideas, like Creative Directions! Now if I only had the time to implement them…😉

If you’ve ever made an arrow quilt, let me know what type of quilt motifs you used on your project.

Be sure to check out my Chatterbox Quilt’s Facebook page to see all the other wonderful quilts created by my fellow Island Batik Ambassadors during this fun challenge.

Be sure you’re following me on Facebook and Instagram so you won’t miss out on what I’ll be creating for my next Island Batik project in April 2024.

Also, check out my fellow Island Batik Ambassadors’ blogs to see what they’re working on next at:

Brenda Alburl ~ Songbird Designs

Renee Atkinson ~ Pink Tulip Quilting

Megan Best ~ BestQuilter

Pamela Boatright ~ PamelaQuilts

Susan Deshensky ~ Lady Blue Quilts Studio

Brittany Fisher ~ Bobbin with Brittany

Preeti Harris ~ Sew Preeti Quilts

Mania Hatziioannidi ~ Mania for quilts

Jane Hauprich ~ Stitch by Stitch Custom Quilting

Victoria Johnson ~ Forever Quilting for You