A Lattice Quilt....fun with a Cultural Fusion Quilt!

This past February immediately after completing the Overlapping Octagon challenge for the UANDUQAL, I grabbed Sujata Shah’s book “Cultural Fusion Quilts” and was inspired to jump in and make my first quilt from her instructions. Some of the quilts in here have been on my bucket list for a long time! I love it when suddenly it becomes clear to me what I NEED to sew next....that point when nothing else crowds in front waving its colorful promise and begging to be first, you know?

Lattice Quilt - 64" x 76"

The Lattice quilt took its place at the front of the line.....it had long been on my “to do” list and its time had come. I began making blocks.....LOVING the freehand cut curves for the lattice. As usual I made a ton of blocks.....when piecing blocks for a “block” quilt, I find that I ALWAYS make many more than I need. I can’t really tell how everything is going to play together until I actually see it up on the wall and I like plenty of choices without having to return to the sewing machine every five minutes! Even so, it's a continuous process of "yes, no" and "make some more". Often what I think will be perfect as I collect a pile of fabrics....just isn’t.

For example, the yellow/green (below) seemed to be too stark....and it needed to exit the premises. I liked the darker leafy green but only had a limited amount so I had to piece a few 9 inch blocks before cutting the lattice strip from the middle....but no problem there. I began with different reds and had to jettison them, but rather late in the game the orange/red fabric showed up and I felt it to be perfect. Yay for a touch of Orange!

Happily I found that I could cut 7.5 inch squares instead of 6.5 inch squares (per instructions) from the pieced units (which began with a 9 inch square) so I was able to make a slightly bigger quilt from my efforts with less fabric loss. Win Win. Sewing the curves was FUN!

I also ironed my seams open when joining the blocks.....it seemed to help with more accuracy at the join.

Witness my rather large pile of leftover blocks.....a few of my originally chosen 'reds' and 'greens' didn't make the cut.....at any rate, there is another quilt somewhere in here I suspect....but it will wait for another day.

This quilt was machine quilted by me in an irregular cross-hatch. A great deal of the fun of machine quilting my own quilts is traveling across all the fabrics and enjoying them all over again while they are playing nicely with each other in a unified whole! I’m sure the same is true for hand quilting. We’re doubling our pleasure, right?!

 Pieced Lattice Quilt Back

And there's my first finished quilt from Sujata Shah's book!

~Edith Yoder Schmitt