Swiss Cross Quilt

Pattern from Quilting Happiness book, two-color, red and white quilt, machine pieced, hand quilted, 2013-2015.  

I've made a red-and-white quilt before, my Denyse Schmidt Single Girl, and it appears I loved it so much (or had so much Kona Chinese Red leftover) I made another.

The problem, once I'd made about half the blocks for this large lap-size and fallen in love with the on-point direction of the blocks, was that I ran out of Chinese Red and every single cut I ordered or bought anywhere was slightly off my original cut. This is troublesome in any work with solids, but reds are especially notorious in any context, and are so easily just a bit off. I'm quite pleased that in these photos, that difference is barely detectable, but you can definitely see it in person. However, I decided at a certain point, I did not care, and in fact to embrace the slightly-varied reds might be my new point. I came to see it as the distinction in this quilt compared to any other of this pattern. Since after all, I did make this using the same fabric scheme as the book the pattern came from, Quilting Happiness. 

I finished the quilt top right around the time I was fully smitten with kantha stitching and pearl cotton for my hand quilting, and went with a double-grid hand quilting stitch along all the block lines. I. Love. It. It sat in-progress on our couch for at least a year while I hand-quilted in good TV time. I went ahead and finished the binding before the quilting, even, so that it wouldn't leak threads and batting all over the sofa while it remained in-progress. (Genius, I know.) Technically, I still need to go inside each white cross and add a little X or a square in hand stitching too, but you know, that's for someday.

This post is being published several years after beginning this project. I'm liking the slow, intentional process, the weeks and months and sometimes years that go into the quilting making art.