Purple Crossroads--Heavy Metal Quilting

The fabric and pattern for this quilt was purchased a few years ago, when eldest daughter loved everything purple.

The pattern is Crossroads, by Allison Spence of Needleworks, and I bought all the batik fabrics from her then store as well.  Allison now quilts and blogs at Meadow Rose Quilting.

The really neat thing about this pattern is its about value placement, and depending on how the values are arranged, I see different things.  For the quilt above, I see the purple stars first, and then, as i look further out, I see the light diamonds, and finally, the medium 'chains'. 

The first time I made this pattern, I saw the diamonds first...and then the stars, and I never really did see the chains.  You can see more photos here  2012 Crossroads

I have the fabrics purchased to make this quilt again, changing the placement of the values again.  But I digress....

The purple quilt--I wanted to quilt it differently from the one with the yellow stars, and so I decided to play with Kim Stotsenberg's Heavy Metal Quilting designs.  I'd been wanting to put them on a quilt for some time, and this one seemed the perfect choice. 

The first step was to take a photo and do some drawing...

I did some sketching first with markers on a plexiglass, to get a basic idea of shapes and how it would look across multiple blocks

 and then I took a photo that was more of a closeup, and used a pencil and tracing paper,  to get a better idea of detail

 The pencil work also let me see how to make it a continuous design, so I could go across the quilt without starting and stopping.  I removed a few lines to enable that.  I also could see that I really liked how the chain blocks made the star block look like it was set on point.

and now to the good stuff--the photos of the actual quilting...

 I had found this very neat tie-dye purple minkee at Chinook Fabrics.  The perfect backing for an 'all about purple' quilt.