Jagged X's

 

At the beginning of 2025 I decided I wanted to make the Jagged X's pattern that I had seen Donna Jordan make ages ago.  I had a batik jelly roll I think I got for my birthday one year and thought the colours would be really nice in a quilt like this.

After finding a nice grey on white batik for the background, I cut out all the required pieces and then spent a long time drawing the diagonal sewing line on the back of the background fabric.  Once this was eventually finished, I sewed and ironed and trimmed all the rectangular pieces, before turning pairs into the square sub-unit, and joining four sub-units to make the larger square "X".  I don't remember how long it took to do this all, but it was probably a few months in between work and everything.  However, once I had the centre together, and some very long strips of squares for the borders, it all got packed up and put to the side.  I had already decided to do the borders in red, but it took me forever to find the right red.  

I had intended to use a batik, given the rest of the quilt was batik, but nothing seemed right.  While I figured out what to do, I started and finished the Spools quilt.  And months later, I decided I didn't need to stick to batik, and not long after found a nice hand-dyed solid from the sewing machine shop.  This meant I could finally finish the borders, and as a result the quilt top.  

The backing came together pretty quickly, as I had enough of some blue sheeting I'd bought for the back of a previous quilt to cover the majority, and a black and blue batik I'd use as backing on another.  But once the top, batting and backing were pinned together, it got folded up and put in the corner until I could figure out how to quilt the thing.  I knew I wanted to do the center different to the borders, but that was about it.  In the meantime I got started on the strip piecing required for a somewhat scrappy (as yet unfinished) quilt.

With some time off from work at the end of 2025, I finally sat down and started scribbling some quilting ideas.  I decided to do some very basic stitch-in-the-ditch for the centre to start, as I had a pretty good idea of what to do in the borders, and wanted to have the quilt stabilised.  The borders were all worked in red thread - Xs in the squares to mirror the centre pattern, and serpentine lines in both red borders.  I added a triangle full of pebbles in the centre of each border, as this allowed me to change the direction of the serpentine line in each section to match the mitred corners.  But then back to that centre.  By now it was almost the end of the year and I really wanted to finish this, so I opted for back and forth lines through all the background sections - the X's were left unquilted so they would pop out a bit.  A 2025 label for the back was quickly made, and I just won't tell anyone that the binding didn't actually get on the quilt until the first day in 2026.  

It is finally done, and I really like how bright it is.  The scrappy quilt I recently started is completely different colours, but this one is similar to some of the long-term quilts I am working on.