Fall 2013 Bloggers Quilt Festival: Liberty Lifestyle X Plus Quilt

This quilt has been on my bed for a little while but I decided that I would wait for the Blogger's Quilt Festival to blog its completion.  I started working on this after I made a few X Plus quilt blocks for the Quilts for Boston effort- doing charity blocks is a great way to try out a design that you are curious about.  

Anyway, it measures 96 x 108: it's composed of 72 twelve inch blocks.  I loved how Holly at Bijou Lovely used black as her rectangles on her X Plus quilt, so I copied her.  Is it me, or does it seem like a lot of people are hesitant to use black in their quilts?  I am smitten and plan to use black much more often: it really makes other colors pop.  

It took patience to make 72 blocks but I just love making bed quilts - they are so useful.

This picture shows the quilting quite well.  I quilted it at Laurena's longarm studio with the Statler Stitcher.  My longarm free motion skills leave much to be desired and following a pantograph at the back of the machine- (following a laser on a paper pattern) was not fun at all the first and last time I did so.  But the Statler is cool: digitized designs are practically endless and the precision of quilting is worth the extra time it takes to babysit the machine as it does the quilting for you.  This design is called "Funky Fan" - sort of a twist on the traditional Baptist Fan.  I really agonized on what design this quilt deserved - the debate even ate up quite a bit of my studio time at Laurena's - but I am glad that I chose carefully because it really fits the quilt.

A while ago I bought Liberty Lifestyle fabrics at Pink Castle Fabrics- both the Bloomsbury Garden and Stile collections.  Those fabrics are the pretty florals in this quilt.  The rest are stash fabrics- various gray and black geometric, small scale prints.

If you are interested in doing the X Plus block, a tutorial is found here on Bad Skirt's blog.  With a little research online, it's not hard to find tutorials on making alternate sizes of this block.

For each block I used 8 different gray/white "low volume" fabrics instead of using the same fabric for each block.  I was hoping to achieve a grid look with the colorful pluses and black rectangles laying on top of a neutral background rather than having a very block/square look or layout.

The backing is a super cheap score I found at Marden's for $1 per yard- an older Jennifer Paganelli print.  It would've been lovely to back this in one of my favorite Liberty Lifestyle prints but they sold out on the online market really fast and there wasn't much chance or time for them to go on a super sale.  I am pretty proud of having a $9 backing- finds like that sometimes fool you into thinking this hobby is affordable.

I have about 576 half square triangles units leftover from this quilt - all of them are sewn together because I have used them as "leaders and enders" over the past several months.  They will make a fabulous quilt someday but I am not in a hurry to attend to them anytime soon:

Thanks for reading!  Go check out all of the other lovely Blogger's Quilt Festival entries on Amy's Creative Side.