crosscut quilt along

Ever since Debbie at A Quilter's Table posted a tutorial for her awesome Crosscut Quilt I've wanted to make one. When she announced that she would be hosting a quilt along this past week via Instagram I was all over it! I quickly prepped my fabric and was ready to start on Monday when she posted her first step.

I chose a variety of low volume prints from my stash for the background and an assortment of red strips for the accent. Honestly, I chose red because that's what I had the most strips of!

Day one, we made X blocks, and day two we trimmed them all to equal size an sewed them into a 3x3 grid. My blocks were trimmed to 9 inches, finishing at 8 1/2 inches.

At this point we had what would be a lovely quilt top, don't you think? Even Ally approved. But that was not the end of it.....

The next day we were instructed to cut up our quilt top into smaller squares. Some members of the quilt along balked at this step. Not me! I was excited to chop it up and see where it would go. And so I did.

I cut 16 six inch blocks. Then I scrambled them around and sewed them back together to make this...

hmmm I'm not sure what that extra red piece is in the bottom corner, but you get the idea.

And now I have a confession to make. In my usual fashion, I couldn't stop. Once I got to this point I had to finish it. So, without waiting for the rest of the quilt along gals, I quilted it up and put the binding on that same day!  I'm impatient like that I guess.

I started out straight line quilting on a diagonal, fairly densely. My quilting lines were about 1/4 inch apart, give or take. Since this project was all about improv, I didn't worry about consistency much. Ok, let's be honest, my straight line quilting is often imperfect! When I got tired of going in one direction, I would turn and do a section of straight lines in a different direction. I continued in this manner until the whole thing was quilted.

And the binding? scrappy low volumes with some little red pieces tucked in here and there. Can you see them?

I think you can see my quilting a bit better in this picture. 

At this point, Ally came in to see what I had done and she was APPALLED! I think her exact words were "MOM! This is a MESS! There's no symmetry!" then she proceeded to inform the dog that I had made something ugly. Ha! When she asked what it was for I told her it was for her new apartment, hahaha. NO WAY! this baby is MINE. 

 I had so much fun dabbling in improv, exploring a new to me technique. Thank you Debbie for hosting this awesome quilt along! I loved it! There are so many fabulous crosscut quilts being made... check out #crosscutquiltalong to see them all.

My crosscut quilt finished at 22 inches square.