Crusader's Cross quilt in progress

During this incredibly hot summer, I've been escaping into two favorite movies: Robin Hood (Russell Crowe, of course!)

and Kingdom of Heaven (Orlando Bloom)

so my brain is saturated with images of the crusades (oh, okay! with Russell and Orlando, too!).

ANYWAY, this quilt block bounced around in my imagination until I had to sit down and draft it.

The blocks are rotary-cut and quick-pieced, though the math was a bit tricky. I've set them on point to look like crosses instead of X's. Bright jewel-toned batiks are the crosses. I'm trying to include at least five colors in each block so that the crosses appear to radiate with faceted jewels. My design wall has been handy for working out the color scheme of each block. Deep midnight blue is the unifying background for each block. Each cross is further unified with the same blue and gold crown, and the crowns are creating an interesting secondary design. Here is the quilt so far.

The blocks are 10" square so the quilt is working up quickly. More to come later, and maybe even a tutorial for this block, if anyone is interested.