The Homestead Quilt (Super Easy!)

 New house, new quilt, right? This plus sign quilt was easy peasy to put together and I'm high-key obsessed with the high contrast/graphic vibe.

I sketched out this design on graph paper and it's so easy you don't need an official pattern if you wanted to recreate it. I wanted to make a plus sign quilt, but make it a bit more modern so instead of doing plus sights across the entire quilt top, I ended it in a point, about 2/3 of the way to the top. This vaguely gives it the basic outlined shape of a house (hence the name), which felt right for being the first big craft I've done since moving in.

The bulk of time spent on this quilt was on dying the fabric itself. Nearly all of the fabric used for the plus signs was dyed to give it a blended look instead of just plain solids. I ice dyed different pieces of fabric overtime to come up with enough for this lap-sized quilt.

From there it was just cutting out a ton of squares. The final quilt is made of 4-inch squares, so they were cut to 4.5 inches to give a 1/4 inch seam allowance all the way around. For my lap-sized quilt I needed 72 squares for the plus signs, and 175 beige squares for the background. You could have absolutely done the top (mostly beige) section in larger pieces but I was working with a weird long scrap and this is what worked best for me. 

I placed out the quilt top on the floor and rearranged the plus signs until I was happy with the mix. From there it's a matter of sewing together rows and rows of the squares to get the whole top together. I followed this chain piecing tutorial which made it super quick. 

But it wasn't the easiest with Jackie trying to be involved with every step. After the quilt top was finished I pressed all the seams open, sandwiched it with the backing fabric and batting. 

And could we have a minute on the backing of this quilt? It's GORGEOUS. I love dying fabric especially when you're not 100% sure how it's going to turn out. This was the most pigmented section which really lets you see the drama ice-dying gives.