A few months ago I joined the South Bay Area Modern Quilt Guild (SBAMQG) that meets once a month in Santa Cruz. At that very first meeting they were setting up a home goods swap. It sounded like a fun project so I signed up. My partner said that she wanted either a table runner or mini quilt that was made of low volume prints, no florals (unless they were modern) and not too many pastels. Well, you can imagine from all the projects and quilts that I've made over the years that I do NOT have too many low volume fabrics. I tend to be a color saturated girl. So off to the fabric store I went and just started picking out as many low volume prints as I could find. In the end I got some really interesting prints. Then where to go from there? Since I've been wanting to make a plus sign quilt for some time now, it was the perfect way to highlight these very subtle prints.
Many little 2 1/2" squares cut. Of course after the first go I realized that I had only cut four squares each when you need five. I had forgotten the square in the middle. There's also a different way of making a plus sign quilt where you use one long rectangle and two squares but I prefer the look of all squares.
I laid out the squares on the floor and then promptly had to pick them up again. Oops, no photograph. So a couple weeks later when I got back to the project I laid out the squares on the dining table. Again I forgot to take a picture. But I decided that it wouldn't take too long to go ahead and sew rows together. Then the next day I finished sewing all the rows together.
Rather than quilt it on the DSM I opted to put it on Freddie the longarm and use the Double Bubble pantograph but at a much smaller height so that it'd look better on the mini wall hanging. I think that the circles turned out to be a great contrast against all the angles of the plus signs. Hopefully my partner likes her quilt. She wasn't at last night's meeting to pick it up but I showed it to the members who were there. The only thing I'd change is to use white thread to piece it instead of the medium grey that I used. Usually that's a perfect piecing color but in this case it still was too dark. I did quilt it with white thread and was very happy with that choice.
What do you think? Have you ever sewn a low volume project?
