Friday, May 3, 2019

Cross Stitch

I had been on a swirl diet. I was using swirls too much (or so I thought) so I decided to force myself to not use swirls for a bit. For several quilts in a row, I stayed away from swirls.

Well, the fast didn't last very long, because I missed them too much. At the end of the day, swirls are the easiest and most versatile design in my arsenal. They're a high bang for the buck design because they're fast, forgiving, and they look much more difficult than they really are. So ... I'm going back to swirls!

This quilt uses the pattern Cross Stitch by Zen Chic which features her Modern Backgrounds Colorbox, a collection of low volume fabrics, and for the foreground I used some solids from Art Gallery Fabrics.

I drew out two designs for this quilt, a simple one using geometric designs in the foreground and swirls in the background, and a far more complicated version that emphasizes the negative space and created all sorts of secondary designs. The old me would have gone for the more complicated version for sure, but the new me was willing to recognize that it's not always worth it to go crazy. For one, all that work wouldn't even show up very much in the low-volume prints. So in keeping with my resolution to enjoy the process and and not drive myself crazy doing something really complicated nobody can even see, I picked the simpler design. (I'll save the complicated design for when I have a solid background!)

The cross stitch blocks are definitely the highlight of the quilt, so I used some very simple dot-to-dot designs to quilt them down but also allow all the unquilted areas to stand out.

And of course, I filled the background with lots of swirls. I quilted them bigger than I usually would, just because this quilt is pretty big and tiny quilting would have been lost anyway on the printed background. Ah, how I missed my swirls.

This quilt with its printed background and softer colors is quite different from the kind of quilts I usually make, which is usually high contrast with bright saturated colors. It might not be as me, but I'm still pretty happy with it. Sometimes I just have to step out of my routine a bit.

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Linking up with: My Quilt Infatuation, Busy Hands Quilts, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Cooking Up Quilts, Powered by Quilting, and Meadow Mist Designs.

10 comments:

  1. I'm glad you let yourself use swirls again; they add such great texture here. And of course I love how your quilting makes a double sided quilt and shows the design on the back as well. Beautiful work!

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  2. I'm glad you brought the swirls back. Another pretty quilt, Liz!

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  3. Swirls look good on any modern quilt, what can we say! Beautiful quilt and quilting.

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  4. Beautiful! I love swirls so much, but always shy away from them. Maybe I need to just bite the bullet and jump into using them?

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  5. You've done it again! Beautiful! Do you enter your quilts in quilt shows? If you don't, it's something to consider. They would certainly be appreciated - by viewers and judges.

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  6. Gorgeous as always! The swirls really make this quilt sing!

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  7. This is a really effective combination of quilting designs, and I like it a lot. Did you use a ruler for the dot to dot quilting, or are you really good at maintaining straight lines freehand? Mine always wobble!

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  8. Beautiful finish! I love the swirls, they are perfect for the background.

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  9. What a fun quilt. I love, LOVE how you quilted it.

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