Lots and lots of pluses

I finally fulfilled one long term ambition and made a quilt for my parents. They really liked the baby quilt that I made for the little monster, so they got one with a very similar color scheme. Actually, a few of the fabrics are even identical. Instead of triangles, theirs is featuring a pluses design though.

The whole project started with cutting the pieces, two little squares and one long rectangle for each plus. Doesn’t look like many? It’s just under 1000 pieces… 😛

Instead of laying all the pieces out to figure out their exact positions, I created a cheat sheet and coded the different fabrics with numbers from 1 to 9. This technique had already proven very handy with the baby quilt last time, but was an actual necessity with the full size quilt this time around. We simply don’t have enough empty floor space in our house to put all these pieces down (and not have them attacked by little monsters).

So according to this nifty cheat sheet, I prepared one little pile of pieces for each row…

,,, which I then sewed together forming strips. You can see a few “editions” to my cheat sheet where I changed the position of a few pluses because I wanted to avoid the two brightest and the two darkest fabrics to have neighboring pluses, so they would stand out to each other more nicely. Below is a picture of a few of the finished strips – it was definitely a great moment to see all these strips of squares and rectangles come together to form the actual pluses!

Another moment where lots of endorphines were released was after all these strips had been joint to one single sheet. After a good little while of ironing it looked like this:

In order to assemble the quilt sandwich – I used a light polyester batting and a matching navy blue flat sheet for the back – I pinned the three layers together using safety pins.

Then, I quilted the sandwich together with gentle wavy lines. It’s hard to see in the picture but I used a turquoise yarn that would stand out nicely against the navy background.

And finally, after attaching an also navy colored binding, here is the finished quilt:

As an additional surprise, I hid a little triangle in the back of one of the corners – which my parents found within only a few seconds 😉

I’m so happy I managed to finish the quilt before my parents’ visit! The last stitches were only completed on Friday, the very day befor their arrival…

So, dear Mutti and Vati, I hope you’ll sleep well under your new blanket! I love you! 💛