Friday, April 21, 2017

R is for Red Cross

This month I'm participating in A to Z Challenge, where 100's of bloggers around the world challenge themselves to write every day for the month of April, working their way through the alphabet.  I'm sewing a patchwork block for each letter of the alphabet. Each day I will share that block and a little about the block and direct you to where you can find a tutorial for that block on the Web.



Red Cross is a traditional quilt block, which has a number of variations on the same theme. There are also a lot of blocks that are called Red Cross which are very different from each other. Being the name of a famous organisation a number of blocks have been named in its honour (I presume). They are usually self descriptive, ie a block that has a red cross in it! The pattern I used came from Quilters Cache here .

I found one very similar to it on Jenny Beyer's website here. It used mitred corners in it (I avoid this particular technique as I haven't really mastered it)



This is mine. Just to be a rebel I didn't make it in red!



The whole quilt made from the red cross quilt block looked really boring to me. The overall design  achieved could have been as easily achieved by cutting strips and squares. I thought it was nothing and certainly won't be going onto my must do list 





7 comments:

  1. I'd love to do more quilting. The quilts I've made were done by hand, since I've never figured out the sewing machine. I'd never heard of this particular quilting style before.

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    1. i have never pieced by hand. I used to finish off the binding by hand but now I machine them down too. Quilting styles have changed dramatically over the years. When I started "country" was all in vogue with the greens and browny reds and farm based themes but they are not to be seen around much anymore. Handwork is very soothing and I embroider and cross stitch a bit as well as crotchet. Its great for car trips

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  2. Yellow in the center is a win! as is the pattern strips. :) Have a wonderful weekend!
    KatyTrailCreations
    Quilts and Quotes theme
    @randallbychance on Twitter from
    KatyTrailCreationsLetterR

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    1. thankyou. As I said in my comment... a whole quilt of them would be boring though. You might get a more interesting affect if you did it as a scrappy quilt

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  3. I agree with you. One block is very nice but the entire quilt becomes blah.

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  4. Looks very blocky and dull but yours looks vibrant and the little checks could break the blocky look.

    Suzy at Someday Somewhere - Respond Intelligently

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  5. You just never know how interesting a quilt pattern will be until you put it all together, do you? I like that you used purple in your square, though. It's such a pretty color.

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