Escapades in Quilt Squaring

One of my favorite projects of the new year is the metaquilt project; it’s an online version of a quilting bee (the “meta” part refers to the online community where all the quilters come from). Each month, one quilter mails out the fabric for her quilt to all the other quilters, and then we all mail completed squares back to her. It’s a quick way to get lots of quilt squares done. We also have enough fabric to do two squares in each month’s fabric–one for the original quilter, and then one for our metaquilt. At the end of the bee, each quilter will have two quilts–the quilt they made for their month & the metaquilt that combines all the fabrics. I haven’t started on my metaquilt yet, mainly because I haven’t decided on a design yet.

I have finished two squares – Naturalist’s Journal Quilt (January) and the Wonky Rainbow Quilt (March). The Naturalist’s Journal square went well enough. It was my first experience sewing; it was thrilling to actually make something with my machine.

The wonky rainbow quilt was another story entirely. Inspired by a gorgeous Anne Brauer quilt called Rainbows of Summer, this quilt used a modified version of an overlapping squares tutorial. We made only the center block in the tutorial, but upsized it to a 12.5″ square. At first, I thought my square was going well; everything was assembled without mishap. It wasn’t until I was preparing to mail the square off when I realized my 12.5″ square wasn’t 12.5″ on all sides. It got down to 12.25″ on one of the sides. (I think the problem was that I didn’t cut my initial strips long enough. I was aiming for 15″, but the directions said to cut free form, and I must have been way too relaxed about that step.)

I didn’t have enough fabric left to do a completely new 12.5″ square, but I sewed the fabric I had left into the strip panel called for in the first stage. Then I cut out the middle section of my bad square, used it to make the central panel of the new square, and added the two side panels from my new strip panel set. Voila! It is not exactly what the tutorial called for, but I think the look is the same.

And now I’ve got some cool remains to use in my metaquilt!