Sunday, February 25, 2018

Red and White Resolution

When I left off in my last post, I was working on a small red and white quilt, but due to a mistake I ended up with two different sized blocks:

I needed to enlarge the birdhouse blocks by a half  inch so they would match the pineapple blocks.  I thought of adding a border to them with some solid white fabric strips that I left over from another quilt.
But, as I think you can see in the photo, they were actually too white and wouldn't quite match.

If you recall, the original challenge for this quilt was to use only fabric from your stash, so I went looking to see what else I had.  Luckily, I found a scrap of white fabric about the size of a fat quarter that I could use:

I had just about enough to frame each of the birdhouse blocks:


I trimmed them to match the size of Pineapple blocks, but then decided to turn them into Snowball blocks to help hide the fact that they had been expanded.

Seemed like a logical choice, but it took me many tries to get the red triangle corners to match up to the Pineapple blocks.  The test block above shows several attempts.  Each one of those triangles pictured in the test block was a slightly different measurement. Also, I had to be careful not to cut into any of the embroidery.

Eventually,  I decided to go with what I had, and I sewed the blocks together:


I'm not thrilled with the way the 2 blocks meet at the seams, but at least they are consistently inconsistent, and I can live with that.

A half inch white inner border, and a 2 inch red outer border will bring this mini quilt up to 20 X 20" which is the maximum size for my guild's challenge.

Fun to see what you can come up with using just your stash, which I think is exactly what the goal of this challenge was supposed to be.
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4 comments:

  1. It looks great! You made it look so easy to fix. Nice use of your stash!!

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  2. The resulting little quilt looks great. Don't you love when you can end up with a finished project all from your stash?

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  3. A creative solution with a charming outcome!

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  4. the snowball idea was perfect even though it took some figuring and adjusting. Nearly every mistake can be adjusted in quilting.

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