Red Cross Meets Very Peri

Scraps. Minimalism. Very Peri, the Pantone Color of the Year. Fabric Play. They all came together in this piece. I hadn't necessarily planned on such a small work (20" x 20.5") for my personal Pantone challenge this year; but when the urge struck, and I realized I only had a half yard of my chosen Peri fabric, I just went for it.

Months ago I had chosen Cotton Couture Crocus as a good match for Very Peri, and rather than cut it into bits, I opted to keep my piece of it in large chunks. I was inspired by a minimalist Canadian Red Cross quilt in Cassandra Ellis' World of Quilts: Reinterpreting Quilting Heritage from Around the Globe. I took Cassandra's advice to "Use any scraps that you have for the 'crazy' cross and enjoy making something beautiful out of very little." So for my cross, I used a handful of red scraps, print and solid, including a small portion of Kona Rich Red.

The quilt was pieced 'straight,' with quilting done in three Aurifil 50wt threads. I started with matchstick-quilting the cross with Aurifil 50wt 2250 [Red]. The bars of the cross weren't all the same widths, but with the quilting, I pretended they were. Then for the periwinkle sections, I used two Aurifil 50wt threads 2520 [Violet] and 4225 [Eggplant]. After attending a trunk show with Audrey Esarey/@cottonandbourbon recently, I loved her way of incorporating thread color as a design feature, and I experimented here by using the lighter thread horizontally in the top half and vertically in the right half; and the darker thread horizontally in the bottom half and vertically in the left half. Does that even make sense? The crosshatch measures 3/8" between each line. Can you see the result of the different threads? 

Just for fun - and since I forgot my plan on my recent Italiano antico - I had trimmed the piece at an angle.

The back was simply pieced using more scraps. 

And then I finished things up with some matched binding in Cotton Couture Crocus and Cherry. I still say that Angled Matched Binding is 150% more tricky than Straight Matched Binding; so yes, I had to refer to my own tutorial.

Simple as it was, I really enjoyed making this one. It was the kind of creative fun this quilting thing should be.