+JMJ+

Hello my dear friends! 

It has been such a long time since I came on here. Part of that reason is the new job, of course, but mostly it's because I've been digging into my workbasket again. And one of those projects was...a scrappy quilt! 

Back in the fall, I talked about potentially making a scrappy quilt on my newsletter. I had inherited a lot more scraps from my mom as we were cleaning out the basement...and they were taking up way too much space in my room! While I loved the previous quilt I had done during the pandemic, I wanted to experiment with a new quilt design. 

After some looking, I decided on a design featuring whirlwind blocks. However, I discovered that this style of block took much bigger scraps than I had available, and the test blocks didn't turn out very well. So I abandoned my original design. 

Later, I found another block design on Pinterest that featured much shorter horizontal stripes and nine patches, which I really liked. After sorting my scraps by color, a great color scheme of reds, yellows, pinks and blues started to form. 

The quilt top came together pretty well, except the vertical stripes. I stretched them a little to make them fit and it warped the design. It's a little noticable upon looking at it, but it became a huge problem when quilting it. 

I nixed the idea of batting at this stage, as the knit fabric I had chosen was a pain enough. It took several tries for me to center and pin the quilt top to the backing without puckering, and the fact that the backing barely puckered at all while quilting was a sheer miracle!

I hand-quilted this one, as my machine would have chewed the backing to ribbons. My handstitching leaves much to be desired. But with the rest of the problems I had with this quilt, it was a minor thing. It took several weeks to finish, and the pins kept dropping out of it (which really annoyed the dickens out of me). I edged it with red binding tape as red was one of the main colors of the quilt. 

So you probably have been asking yourself, why did I choose a knit fabric for the backing?

The answer is that, at the time, this is what I had. It had been stashed for years, and was slated to be some kind of blanket anyway (it was terrible for clothing). 

It turned out well, but I will NEVER use a knit fabric as a backing fabric ever again!! 

All in all, the Cantankerous Crosses Quilt definitely earned it's moniker. But it's not a bad looking quilt, in retrospect. 

What sort of projects have you all been working on? Tell me in the comments below!

God bless, 

Catherine