I shared the top panel of this quilt when we returned from the Holidays . The design is mine and you can read a bit about it in this post. I’ve finish the quilting and the binding lately.

For the quilting, I wanted to put to practice some notions I learned from Angela Walters‘ books and Craftsy class. I played with contrast: straight vs. curvy lines, also in the density of quilting. The straight line quilting in the crossing bars is less heavily quilted. For the negative space, I initially planned to do some bubble quilting. But after making a small sample, I realized how much thread it would require, and how time too… So, I did some dense loop quilting. This was a good compromise. I was also afraid that the bubble quilting would stiffen the quilt too much and I wanted to keep it soft for a little baby. So, overall it was a good solution. I also wanted to repeat the quilting used for the crossing bars in the negative space. So, I did two other crossing bars (narrower ones) in the left upper quadrant of the quilt.

In the next photos, you can see that in the patchwork I did some arcs on each edge. I followed the great trick in this blog post on how to quilt it continuously.

It can be seen more clearly from the back:

I’m more comfortable doing free motion quilting. It seems each time I do straight-line quilting with my walking foot, I can’t avoid the fabric shifting. In this case, it was in the sage bars. It is pretty obvious I would say. I did rip out part of it to redo it. But, it didn’t change much. After quilting this quilt, I spoke about it with my friend Cinzia from Deux Petites Souris, who is quite good with straight line quilting. She gave a few tips. I did do a few tests since then. It seems that decreasing thread tension and quilting in the same directions helps out. Still, I think I might try using basting glue next time instead of pins. I’m not a big fan of putting glue on my quilt, even though it will be washed away after. I have avoid it until now, but I think I’ll give it a try next time I have a project for which I want to do straight-line quilting.

I kept the back really simple. I used a raindrop print that I had in my stash and coordinated well. And I used some leftovers from the Kona in Sage and Pond used on the front. The print is Tidbits by Kari Ramsay of Fresh Cut Quilts for Henry Glass & Co.

My Crossing Road quilt is now available in my Etsy shop and waiting for a new home!