the criss cross quilt

A few weeks ago I posted about a new project. Well, it's done!

Introducing the Criss Cross Quilt.



From the get-go, this project has been a challenge. Generally speaking, to start a project I need a big dose of inspiration. Sometimes that comes from cruising Flickr, sometimes from a stack of fabrics, or an outfit a friend is wearing, sometimes from a book. Since I knew I wanted this to be a more traditional quilt, I had originally chosen a sawtooth star block. The inspiration came from the book  Quilting for Peace: Make the World a Better Place One Stitch at a Time. I think I have mentioned this book before, but I'll say it again - I love it! There is a quilt in the book that is monochromatic sawtooth stars and it is so beautiful.  My idea was to go out and get a bunch of different fabrics in red, gold and off white type colours and to piece many, many sawtooth stars out of them to create an eclectic but somewhat traditional quilt top.  I didn't think I had time to order online, and I didn't have the money to pay what my LQS was charging and so I went to the dreaded Fabricland in search of fabric.  Thus the end of all my inspiration.  After a frustrating hour wandering around the store and finding literally NO red fabric, I gave up.  All while uttering quiet profanities.  Oops.

I decided to focus on solids.  I had seen a beautiful quilt on Flickr by cauchy09 and used that as my inspiration for this quilt.  She mentioned that the pattern came from a book called Quilting Pieces of the Past (Better Homes & Gardens) but not being able to find it at the library, and not wanting to purchase the whole book, I decided to just figure out the pattern myself.  I stuck to the red and white of the original quilt because it's beautiful and it was a set of colours I knew Grandma B would like.  I found an AMAZING deal of some Kona cotton at Blueberry Buckle Quilt Shop and ordered up 7 yards of it in Chinese Red and Snow.

I had mentioned in the previous post about using Oh Fransson's postage stamp piecing method and how well it had worked.  It did actually work very well, except that I forgot to account for seam allowances on my first block and it went to waste.  Then of the subsequent 9 blocks I was a little sloppy in some places and ended up running into issues with squaring the blocks.

In the end, it got done.  I did come to like it more than I thought I would, especially after quilting it was my standard stippling.  I spent several hours at work binding and a few more at home in bed binding and it got finished last night.  I have to say, if I'm proud of anything on this quilt it's the corners.  For the first time, all of my binding corners are perfect.  And I mean, PERFECT.  They are perfectly shaped and even on all four corners and that is a big accomplishment for me.



The back is solid red with a whole lot of bright white stitching showing.  I think it's a neat effect.



The label of course.  I don't really use cowtown baby as a label anymore, usually just an s for superlative, but I thought I'd throw on this one because that is the label that Grandma B and my mother-in-law know.



And the ubiquitous folded with binding out picture.  I love it.

This morning it got sent off in the mail all wrapped up pretty.  I paid a whopping $36.00 CAD to ship it which if you ask me is a bit unreasonable for shipping withing Canada, but I wanted to make sure it got there on time and that it was insured in case it goes missing.  (Which by the way is highly likely, stupid Canada Post).

I've got a couple of things in the works for more posts soon, and a giveaway coming up at the end of the week in honor of my birthday, so stay tuned!