Before I did Quilting in the Garden, I had started constructing these criss cross blocks. My plan this time was to make a large quilt. I read somewhere that one of the significant things about quilt art was that it could be made on a large scale.
So I made criss cross blocks in my spare time. I made a LOT of criss cross blocks, and kept adding them to the design wall.
Then one day I thought I might have enough to put together into a quilt. But I was flummoxed. They were too crowded and just a mess on the wall. You can see in this picture that I was auditioning some black prints to use as spacers in this quilt.
And then one morning I woke up too early. I didn’t really want to get out of bed, so I got my Kindle Fire and decided to look at quilting blogs. Now, I really don’t have that many quilting blogs bookmarked on my kindle. So its kind of amazing that I got so much inspiration from just looking at two blogs. First I looked at Judy Martin’s blog. I was impressed by the large scale of her quilts, all the wide open white space, AND that she had completely covered the quilt in hand stitching.
Next I looked at The Silly Boodilly blog, and she happened to have an entry explaining her design process. Mostly I was impressed by the simplicity of the “nine patch” quilt at the end of this piece. (P.S. I LOVE the barn in this post.)
And that’s when I got the idea of how I would construct these criss cross blocks. I would put them in 20 inch blocks (later changed to 24 inch blocks) to give them more open space and provide a little structure. I used yarn to make a 24″ block on the design wall so I could figure out how to place the criss cross blocks.
Its still a puzzle trying to figure out how to put the blocks together without using any y-seams. But the more you do it, the easier it gets.
I also decided that I would “kantha stitch” all of the background. So when I looked for the background fabric I would use, I had Kona Snow, which is my favorite “white,” and I also had some white backing fabric (108″ wide) from Joann’s, which was a looser weave, and therefore would be easier to stitch through, so that’s the one I chose.
With my new construction decision, I decided against adding the black spacers. The block construction would be enough. I did make a few circle criss cross blocks. Because, you can never have enough circles 🙂 So, here’s how its going:
I am going to make it a 4X3 construction, so the size will be 72 wide by 96 high. That should probably keep me kantha stitching through the winter!
debby quilts 