TODAY'S QUILTING FUN

When we had our town quilt club meeting on Tuesday I was reminded that we are making quilts for a nearby nursing home.  I had forgotten about that.  It's time to get busy.

I had a pattern I wanted to use, and got out a stash of materials that would do (I thought).

Here's the pattern:

This is a pattern called "Entwined" from 40 Fabulous Quick-Cut Quilts by Evelyn Sloppy (What a name for a quilt designer!), published by Martingale & Company in 2005.

Here's the material I planned to use, some strips sewn together:

I realized right away that this was not going to work!  There are supposed to be 5 strips in a group.  I had planned 4 whites and 1 coloured.  NOT GOOD!

So I took one of the white strips off each group, and sewed on another coloured strip.  The planned pattern changed also, to a Rail Fence design.

Well, I don't care a whole lot for that.  So I went the closet and looked for a fabric, a fairly large piece for the "rail" that would make a good contrast to the other fabrics.  I found this humungous piece, and cut off about 12".  This is 108" wide, and meant to be used as a backing for a whole quilt.

After I cut off the 12" I thought maybe I shouldn't have done that!  It's now just 108" x 108"--and was probably planned to be the backing for one of the large quilts that's in the pipeline somewhere.  But it's cut now, so that's it.

I was able to cut five 2 1/4" strips from that.  The other strips are all 2 1/2", but because the samples of fabric were just barely over 12" wide, I need to make the third, beige strip a little narrower if the block is to end up as 6" square, unfinished (5 1/2" square finished.)

O.K.  We'll go with that.

That's not too bad.  But it does show that a stronger contrast between the "rail" and the other two strips in each block would have showed up better.  Too late now.  This is what we're going with!