WandaLandQuilts
Making Memories Through Quilts
Floating Plus Signs Quilt
The blocks were created from a book by Tula Pink called 100 Modern Quilt Blocks. Since the book suggests that the quilter name the blocks themselves, I called this Floating Plus Signs because that’s exactly what it looks like to me; however, in the book it’s Block 11.
I had this collection of delightful Oriental fabrics to make the blocks from. I pulled the gray background from my stash. I believe it was leftover from another quilt, but who really knows? I seem to have a lot of leftovers from other quilts so I’m trying to use those up. So, creating the blocks and sewing them together was pretty easy and made a delightful lap size quilt.
The machine quilting is what I was looking forward to the most. I wanted to practice my longarm quilting and this was the perfect piece. I did stitch in the ditch (SID) around the plus signs using a ruler and that went pretty well. SID quilting can be tricky and takes some concentration. The background around the plus signs is a swirl pattern. I was practicing keeping the spacing even and not getting stuck in any of the corners – trust me … there were a lot of corners! The first border, I used a plastic template to trace a border design, so I just quilted on the line. Sounds easy enough, but still takes practice and concentration. The outside border is my own design. This was practicing several things, backtracking, spacing, stitch in the ditch, and making the design while stitching in all directions.
This quilt has been entered in the Quilt Guild of Indianapolis show in October 2015. I also decided to have it judged as well. It’s been awhile since I’ve had a quilt judged so it will be interesting to see what the judges’ comments tell me.
The longarm quilting advice is correct – practice makes perfect! Although this is not ‘perfect’ it sure did give my confidence a boost.
Started: March 2014
Finished: September 2015
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