red cross quilt

After 16 months, it's finally finished. I first posted about it here.

You can see the inspiration quilt here. And a larger shot here.

It is for my oldest son. I finished it right after he went to bed one day this week, so I had it laying out, ready for him in the morning. (He was quite anxious for me to finish it.) When he saw it in the morning, he ran over, and got underneath and started snuggling up in it immediately. He loves it so much already. It makes me smile.

The quilting was a little more challenging than usual. First, I used red thread to outline each cross. Then I stippled around each cross-which is where is got sketchy. It's hard to evenly fill in the spaces without quilting yourself into a dead end. It's not very even and it's a bit bunchy in places, but I am trying to cut myself some slack...at least there aren't any puckers, so I am happy with that.

Since I haven't been buying fabric and this is out of my normal quilting color scheme (pink) I was doubtful that I would be able to scrape up enough backing fabric. But I found this post which inspired me to dig a little deeper in my stash and come up with a solution. I'm really really happy with what I came up with. I had just enough fabric. And as weird as it seems to say this, I love the drabness of it.

Here's a closer shot of the back....



For the binding I ran into the same problem...finding enough fabric in my stash that actually matches. I had a piece of solid fabric that was not quite large enough. So to add enough length, I added just 3 small sections of patterned fabric to the solid strips to make a piece of binding long enough to go all the way around. I like the bit of interest that it adds to the quilt.

It measures 54" x 72".

I improvisationally pieced (yay) the crosses, then added borders to make all the squares 9.5", so the blocks are 9" finished.