12 | Found: A Quilting Motif for my Scrappy Swiss Cross Quilt

I know it seems like I’ve been blogging about my Scrappy Swiss Cross Quilt forever, but blogging is first and foremost a chronicle of my creative process, and thus this shows you that I’ve been thinking about this quilt for a long time! Anything I make involves the use of resources that I don’t have a lot of, (the biggest of that is time!) so the larger/more important a project is, the more thought I put into it, so I know that I’m happy with the finished product. So a queen size quilt that will live on my bed for years is obviously something I’m going to spend a lot of time thinking about!

While enamoured of the Swiss Cross motif that is ubiquitous in the design world right now, and has been for a few years now, I want to make sure that MY Swiss Cross Quilt is unique and has something new to add to the world! So this Spring I had some gift giving opportunities that allowed me to make smaller Swiss Cross projects and try out different quilting motifs for my large quilt, I’m quite clever that way! These 2 pillows:

Have an irregular grid pattern stitched in a thread that contrasts with the background and blends into the cross itself. This works great for this single motif, but as my quilt will have crosses of many colors, this won’t work on the larger quilt.

I used another more open grid pattern on this baby quilt I made, using a multicolor thread in pastel values:

This grid was pretty fast to stitch up, and the thread did a good job of blending in with the different colors. But there’s a bit to much space between the quilted lines, I want more of an all-over crinkly goodness once the quil is washed and dried.

So, neither of these quilted patterns are a go for my queen size quilt. PLUS! It would be really hard to quilt in both directions while using my quilt as you go with no sashing method. I needed an all-over pattern that I could quilt a couple rows at a time that would blend into the next row that I add. I also want an angular pattern to echo the squares of the Swiss crosses, so I considered using this meandering squares pattern:

but I’ve quilted 3 big quilts with this pattern, so I wanted to try something new. I follow Trisch Price on Instagram, she’s a long arm quilter that does some really cool angular work. She often uses a spiralled square motif that I thought would be a good fit. I spent a bit of time figuring out how it worked on a quilt sandwich, and then got to work using it on the 4 extra blocks I have leftover:

and voila:

By George, I think I’ve got it! Now, it’s on to assembling the rows and actually quilting the thing!!!!