Purple Cross Storm at Sea Quilt

One of my co-workers recently retired. It is not often that I make a specific quilt for a specific person but this time I felt compelled to do so. Take note world. If the words "I want to make you a quilt" ever fall from my mouth, you are a super special awesome person. She retired on relatively short notice so there wasn't time to make anything to give her on her last day at work.

Instead, I told her to go check out my Pinterest page and see if any of those quilts appealed to her. So she did, and she mentioned two of them. One she said lots of things about so I knew this is the one she really wanted, but she was nice and mentioned a second one as a backup plan. So, I went and looked at the one she chose and in my head I'm thinking...wait, you can choose any quilt BUT THIS ONE. Because this one looks HARD.

So I slept on the idea and woke up thinking, "Why not?" I pinned that quilt because I liked it and I'm smart enough and can figure this out. Bring it on! The first step was to pull fabric. For a purple quilt. From my stash. That has hardly any purple in it.

After studying the picture of the quilt for a while, I determined that six different purples were needed. For some of those purples, I had to go scrappy in order to have enough fabric. It was tight getting all the pieces cut, meaning I spent some portion of time digging through the trash for what I thought were throw away scraps but had to be salvaged and pieced with other scraps to make it through. There were a few brow sweating moments during the cutting stage.

Then, I had to ponder the construction. The link from Pinterest goes to this tutorial. Based on the tutorial I could paper piece the blocks or make templates for them. I wasn't happy with either of those choices and then I remembered my handy TriRecs ruler. That is how I decided to construct this quilt.

I worked on it a little each day and took a picture every day to show my progress. I need to find some sort of time lapse software because this would be really cool to see that way. Instead, just scroll through the pictures quickly and maybe it will be a similar affect. Ahem. Maybe.

First Block

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four

Day Five

Day Six

Day Seven

Day Eight

Day Nine

Day Ten

Day Eleven

The top is finished. I think. I am still pondering a border. And how to quilt it. I do love how the top turned out. This one is going to be set aside for a short time while I think about where to go next with it.

There are a couple of other simple finishes waiting for me on the side line. They are starting to glare at me just a bit from across the room. I'll give them some attention then come back to this one with a well thought out plan. I can't wait to finish this and send it off to its recipient. I think she's going to love it.