Fall is in the air – a cross quilt

It was a bit of a race to get this quilt finished, as I wanted to include some beautiful fall leaves in my finished quilt photos. I’m pleased to say I won – while most leaves in our area had already fallen, I managed to find a little section of woods that still had some nice foliage!

This quilt was made out of the stack of fabrics I pulled here, and as I said before, while that stack originally read spring-like to me, once I made it up into this quilt it really ended up having a nice fall feel to it.

To add to that fall feel, I decided to quilt this leaf pattern, which is a little twist on Elizabeth’s Dogwood quilting pattern – a definite favorite of mine (yes, I may have mentioned that a time or two!). Anyway, I love the way she uses a grid for the quilting and started thinking about how I could use the grid to come up with a pattern to quilt leaves with a continuous quilting line. I did several drawings before I came up with this one, and I’m so pleased with it. I intended to draw out an example of how I quilted it, but didn’t get it done in time for this post. So perhaps you’ll see that as an upcoming post!

I guess I failed to get a full shot of the backing, but it’s mostly this brown/tan solid, with a pieced strip along the middle. I love seeing all the quilting on the mostly solid backing, and I hope you can get a sense of that, despite the late afternoon autumn lighting in the photo above.

I debated a bit on the binding – the obvious choice would have been one of the solids I used on the front, but I wanted the binding to stand out, so auditioned a few different solids, including a few shades of pink/purple. One almost got my vote, but in the end I felt this gold color (cotton couture cinnamon) really added an extra shot of a fall color to this quilt.