Meet Citified, a gorgeous new line of Island Batiks for Sherry Shish of Powered by Quilting. This is the fourth time I have been lucky enough to participate in Sherry's Blog Tour. This is her fourth signature line is designed by in-house Island Batik Designer Kathy Engle.
Citified should be shipping to stores NOW (or very shortly due to current supply chain issues)! You can pick up yardage or a precut like a 10″ stacker or 2.5″ strip pack. To find your closest quilt shop that carries Island Batik, check out the Store Locator here.
When I saw this colors I knew I needed to work with them. But the oranges and the reds are so different from my normal color pallet. It took me a bit to figure out what I was going to do with these bright colors. I was channeling Halloween when I finally settled on a design.
Meet Going Batty.
Every year my daughter goes to her grandparents for a month. Halfway between us and her Grandparents is Carlsbad Caverns. We first took her there when she was 4 years old. She loves going there. When she was little, she would call it “batcarls cave.” The bats were one of the magical aspects of the cave that stuck in her young mind. One of the most amazing things you can do at the Caverns is watch the bat flight. During the summer months up to 500,000 bats live in the caves. The bats wake up at dusk and over a period of an hour or so, all of the bats leave the cavern. The opening is a big hole in the ground. It starts out as just a few bats and becomes a flow of thousands of bats swirling up and out of the caves. There are so many bats in the air it looks like smoke. These bats weight about 13 grams each and have wing spans of about 11 inches. The bats spiraling across the quilt top mimic the way the bats spiral out of the cave.
Here are some fun facts about these bats:
Insect-eating bats save farmers approximately $23 billion in annual agricultural losses in the United States alone.
Millions of free-tailed bats from Bracken Cave, Texas eat more than 100 tons of insects nightly, intercepting billions of migrant pests before they can lay eggs, a huge savings to farmers.
Just one bat can catch 1,000 mosquitoes in a single hour, helping reduce the spread of diseases such as West Nile virus.
A colony of just 150 big brown bats can eat enough cucumber beetles in a single summer to prevent them from laying 33 million eggs that hatch into rootworms, a devastating crop pest.
In Europe’s Iberian Peninsula, small, strategically placed bat houses, by attracting just 5 pipistrelle bats per acre, were able to eliminate pesticide spraying in rice paddies.
Bats as pest control in Indonesia saves cocoa growers approximately $780 million annually.
Bats are primary predators of green stink bugs, the most serious pests of macadamia nut orchards.
These Facts are from https://www.merlintuttle.org/resources/essential-bat-values/
If you want to totally fall in love with bats, you can listen to this two-part interview with Merlin Tuttle. https://www.alieward.com/ologies/chiropterology
The bats are done using fusible web applique. The pattern comes with the svg files to make the bats. When you make this beautiful quilt with these applique bats, you are also making a beautiful conversation piece! You can amaze your friends and family with these facts about the bats on your quilt! You can pick up the pattern Here.
Come back next weekend for the Bonus Pattern. I took all of the stitch and flip scraps and bit of extra yardage to make something spectacular.
The blog hop runs through next week, with an Instagram loop giveaway next weekend, so I will hopefully have the fresh pattern ready for that! In the meantime, enjoy the rest of the blog hop!
March 10 – SKIP DAY
March 13 – Sally Williams of Paleofish Designs <- YOU ARE HERE
March 17 – Kathryn LeBlanc of Dragonfly’s Quilting Design Studio
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