The quilt I began in the last entry has made some progress. I’ve discovered some challenges, too. When you work with pre-cut strips, they’re pretty standard: 2 1/2″ throughout the length, usually 42-55″. But when you cut your strips yourself, even a standard measurement of 2 1/2″ can sometimes… vary.
And your seam allowances can vary, too. Fabric stretches. It doesn’t always obey the rules that you laid down in your initial design. Strips of cloth that are cut from the same fat quarter or yardage may vary substantially in width just based on how well I folded the cloth. You can see these variances in width manifesting themselves across the quilt, row by row down the picture.
It’s probably hard to believe that this quilt didn’t start out as dozens of squares, though. So here’s partial proof: a collection of strips of fabric laid out on a table in groups that can then be laid out according to the color pattern at the far end of the ironing board. When sewn together, and sewn into a tube, those strips can then be cut off in slices like so many layers of bundt cake. The slices can be unbound at one point, to make a single width of the quilt. And so it goes, one layer at a time, down the length of the quilt.
It looks like this quilt will get a black border around the edges, and then some sort of scheme of squares, and then another black border, before edge binding. That will make the whole quilt about the size of a crib quilt, which will make it 60″ long by 36″ wide. But it could be expanded to 90″ x 70″, which would make it a twin bed’s bedspread.
Do you want a quilt? Do you want this one? What size would you want it to be?
