X's and O's...

Here's my finished X's and O's mini!  It finished out at 18 x 24.5. Once I actually got my butt in gear and cut up the pile of fabric that had  been sitting dormant for months on end, it moved ridiculously fast from start to finish.  Of course, that is because any monkey could look at this and replicate the pattern, but I still love it.  Mostly because it all stems from this little work of art from my oldest:

So we flow from that to this:

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To this!

Really the only thing that changed from the sketch to the finished product is that I added a few extra blocks of pink onto each row to even out the length a bit and arranged the letters differently to allow them to be a bit larger in size.  I love how all the pinks stand out so beautifully from the turquoise and even more how the appliqued X's and O's in the Posy fabric are the perfect touch.

The X's and O's are appliqued onto the quilt using Wonder Under - a paper backed fusible web.  I tried out a bunch of fonts, upper case and lower case letter combinations.  The one I thought was thick enough on this small scale but also nice and script-y was Channel in lower case letters.  I ended up printing out my letter templates in a size 250.  It sounds big, but that one square with my text is only about 6" square.  I finished them off with a blanket stitch in white.

There is even more Posy on the back side along with a stacked coin strip of pink.

I've seen a lot of wall hanging/mini quilts that have little corners on the back for easy hanging, so that's what I tried for this one.  The corners and the binding are done in a black/grey floral fabric that worked so well for this color palate!

I went back and forth on quilting this - I was honestly and truly going to do a loopy free motion quilting over the whole surface, but then I thought of straight line cross-hatching and how it would continue the X's into the quilting and I was sold.  I thought that I might try out pebble quilting in the pink bars (to add in some more O's, natch) but I kind of liked how they ended up standing out when they were just outlined.

If I had to do the pattern again on a larger scale, I think that I'd give loopy quilting a try - plus a larger scale would really highlight your "bar" fabrics and give you a BIG chance to applique some Xs and Os in fun fonts...or whatever word, initials, name that you'd like!  What do you think?  Interested in doing a throw or baby-sized version along with me later this summer?

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