Monday 15 January 2018

Crossed Paths

This block was originally used here for a Cotton + Steel quilt I had made.  After making all the blocks I had an aha moment.  More of that later, here is the block.


To  make a 12" block you need two feature fabrics and a background fabric.  From each of the feature fabrics cut two 4 3/4" blocks and one 5 7/16" block.



Cut the 5 7/16" blocks twice on the diagonal.  Sew two pieces of each colour together to make a quarter square unit that should be 4 3/4"

From the background fabric cut a 7 3/16" square and two 3 7/8" square.  Cut the larger square twice on the diagonal and the smaller squares once on the diagonal.


Lay out as shown and sew together.  The first time I made a quilt from this block I sewed separate blocks, laid them out and sewed together.  That is when I realized that there was a much easier way to make this design into a quilt.


I laid all the feature fabrics out, then cut 4 3/4" background pieces and placed them as shown.  I eliminated a lot of seams in the background for a much easier quilt to put together.  I still needed to cut the edge insets the same as the block above.  The block calls for 7 3/8" squares, but I cut mine at 7 1/2" so I would have a little wiggle room and could trim the edges after.  The corner insets were cut from 4 1/4" blocks for the same reason.  I sewed the diagonal rows together first, and then sewed all the rows together to finish the quilt.


I ended up with a 36" quilt, perfect for a baby quit or table topper.

You can use any size for your feature fabric and background pieces, adjusting the edge insets to match.


That is what I did for this Cotton + Steel piece which will end up in my quilt at some point.  I based it on a 3 1/2" cut size for the feature and background fabrics.  I purposely cut the insets quite a bit larger so that I could trim them down to a size that will work in my quilt.

4 comments:

  1. That is a great block and looks so pretty in the C&S fabrics.

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  3. Thanks for posting the details of how you created this quilt. I think rather than fussing with setting triangles and their bias edges, I would approach it differently. I would take a square of the colour/print fabric, and 'snowball' three of the four corners with the background fabric. Then simply sew the squares in rows with the colour/print corners meeting. With four units together, you have your easy "plus-sign-on-point" block.
    ~Diana from Toronto

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