Thanks to Vesta

According to Wikipedia, "Cross-stitch is the oldest form of embroidery," and from the little I read around the web about it, that could very well be true. It was certainly the very first stitching I ever did, thanks to this woman.

That is my maternal grandma, Vesta. It's her I thank for initiating my love of sewing, back when she moved into our family home when I was a preteen, and brought along her black Singer machine. But it was Grandma who also took me shopping years prior while I was visiting on vacation, and bought me my first stamped cross-stitch fabric, and let me choose purple variegated floss. She taught me how to cross-stitch, and I created a "dresser cloth" as we called them back then, and it graced my bedroom dresser for many years after.

I can't say that I had that embroidery on my mind when I first saw Pile O'Fabric's Cross Stitch Quilt Block tutorial earlier this year. But cross-stitch obviously had a soft spot in my heart, so I started making some blocks, thinking it would be a good way to use up a bunch of my scraps. I made my blocks larger than the tutorial, using Kona Ash 5" charm squares as my block backgrounds, cutting my scrap strips 1 1/2"x7". 

 

After I had created a few stacks of blocks, my childhood stitchery came to mind, and from then on I had the beginnings of a quilt plan.

With the size of my blocks, turns out I really couldn't recreate much of my original cross-stitch design, but I made enough to make me very happy.

I was very random with arranging block colors, but hopefully you can tell that I made the circular "flower" in the stitchery above. For backing, thankfully I had nothing large enough in my stash to make a single-fabric backing, and that forced me to get creative. After making just a few super-sized (15") cross-stitch blocks, I happened to attend a lecture by Victoria Findlay Wolfe of 15-Minutes of Play fame. Fresh from that, I was inspired to start sewing through my scrap bin, making 8" improv blocks, just sewing and sewing until it seemed like "enough." Quilting is a diagonal wavy-stitch cross-hatch, which I questioned for a while, but after the wash-and-dry crinkle test, actually is quite perfect.

I was brave, and used the scrappy binding I'd made of strips from at least 8 other quilts. Crazy but fun.

The quilt measures 60" square, and no, the scrap bin is not empty, but I feel pretty pleased with using as many as I did for this two-sided quilt. And if my grandma was still around, I'm thinking she'd be pleased too.

This project was on my 2014 Q4 FAL list!
Linking up with Fabric Tuesday and Scraptastic Tuesday.