THE THREE DAY WONDER

I'm calling this quilt the Three Day Wonder--it's real name is Picket Fence and the pattern was published in the November/December issue of QUILTMAKER magazine.  A woman I know was cleaning out her sewing room and came across several old quilting magazines which she passed on to me.  The Picket Fence quilt pattern caught my eye and I made one.

On Wednesday Brenda (of The Fabric Nook) and I were discussing putting on another "Demo Day."  We decided on the second week of September and the Picket Fence pattern.  I bought a 2 1/2" strip set to make a demo quilt to attract interest.

Thursday I was up early and devoted the extra day time to cutting out the quilt.  (See the last post).  Thursday I sewed pretty much all day, Friday a good part of the day, and today some of the afternoon.  The quilt top is complete!!!

The original pattern called for 3" strips, so I had to redesign for 2 1/2" strips.  That wasn't too hard, but of course the finished 3 x 4 block quilt is smaller.

This quilt used 18 of the 24 strips.  The others were too light to make the contrast.  The yellowy fabrics were left over from the large quilt I made two years ago that's on our bed in Arizona.  I like the combination.

For borders I'm thinking a 3/4" inner border of teal batik and a 2" outer border of the darkest fabric, with the same fabric for binding.  I'll have to see what's available.

This is a very easy quilt as there are really no points to match.  Each block was trimmed to a pretty precise 6 1/4".  If I had made "skinnier" seams they could have been 6 1/2" blocks.  That's trimmed, ready to go into the quilt, finishing at 6".  But I like to have fairly substantial seams to give the quilt strength.

It was also very easy to sew together because of the squaring up to 6 1/4".  There were no problems whatsoever.  I do like to "nest" all seams, and that turned out to mean that I couldn't "rosette" all the intersections, i.e. spread them open.  So I just pressed them all in the same direction, and the quilt top is quite smooth.  

I'm very happy with it, and had a very good time making it these last few days.