SAHRR Round 4 Square in a Square

I had intended to add more fish in a subsequent round, and this round was perfect for it! Brenda of Songbird Designs is this week’s host who gave us the directive: add Square in a Square blocks in this round. 

Along with the fish which are the SiaS block, I made three more plain SiaS blocks, pulling in two fabrics from previous rounds as well as introducing the bubbles shimmery water-like fabric.

If you look closely at last week’s fish, you’ll see they are square in a square.

In Carol Doak’s book there are two paper-pieced fish patterns, both 4” finished, so I had planned to make the second one, and even had already traced it onto freezer paper. However, it is not a square in a square. Basically I took her three-piece fish body pattern, and changed up the tail a little bit so it would fit in the SiaS design.

As before, I made two and flipped the second one so they could face each other. Just one of the fabrics is common to both fish.

I wasn’t liking how very ‘white’ the quilt was going so I thought this round should go a bit darker but how to do that since the fish needed to float on the white with turquoise fabric? When I was looking through my turquoise scraps box, I saw the roll of 10” by WOF strips Sarah of Confessions of a Fabric Addict had sent me as a prize for one of the years I participated in Hands2Help. I thought it would work perfectly for one of the plain SiaS blocks I planned to do and then I thought it would be a good transition to putting more of that fabric in this round.

Building on the design wall

Once I had placed the fish off-centre with the SiaS plain block between them, I saw how the new turquoise shimmery fabric was also bubble-esque, so I knew I had to make a couple more fish bubbles to rise up into this round. And I now know that when I quilt this, it is going to get fat bubbles quilted into it randomly too!

Because I want this to be a baby size quilt I elected to just add at the top for this round. It now measures 29.5” by 34.5”.