There’s one quilt that I finished in 2024 (yes, 2024!) that I never shared: Surplus.

It’s been ages (aaaaages!) since I’ve been on a quilty retreat, but the last few times I’ve gone away for a sewing break with friends, I needed to scramble around for the right project. Surplus was one of those quilts that just happened because I knew it’d be a fairly easy make, and it used up a bunch of colours I had in my stash. The perfect retreat project!

This quilt is based on Sunday sketch #370, which featured a standard layout of squircles (square-ish circles) with crosses in their middles. The crosses alternate between filled and empty, with cornerstones in the sashing echoing the centres of the crosses. Circles + pluses = Surplus!

I love the colour palette of the original design, but I knew I didn’t have those colours in my stash. I did have a bunch of bright happy colours though! So I dug in to pick some out.

I tried doing a layout in EQ8 based on the colours I had on hand, but you can see that they differ a little bit from the end result. I don’t remember why, but I obviously put some colours back and pulled replacements.

In the end, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on perfecting my colour placement. Looking at the quilt now, there’s a few blocks I might move around if I could. But I can’t, so I won’t spend any more time thinking about it! 🙂

Surplus was quilted by Valerie Cooper of Sweet Gum Quilting using the Abacus E2E design from Patricia E. Ritter and Tracey Russell. I wanted a simple all-over quilting design that worked well with the curves and straight lines in the piecing, and this one did the trick.

Because this was a ‘just because’ quilt – not made for a deadline or any particular purpose – it languished for a while. I dragged my heels binding it after quilting, then took ages (aaaaaages!) to photograph it. (Thanks to Tara Glastonbury for her studio floor space and ace image-fixing skills!) But I like having a record of finished quilts, so here we are. Better later than never.

Since finishing this quilt, I’ve seen a few other circles + plus quilts around, like the Wagon Wheel quilt pattern from Denyse Schmidt (with much bigger circles, and rotated for some visual interest). It’s obviously a good pairing of basic shapes. And, in this case, a good way to use up some random solids. I don’t feel like I made much of a dent in my stash though, so maybe I need to go on another quilty retreat soon??