SAHRR Round 5 “Four”

This round’s directive was given to us by Gail at QuiltingGail. She said the theme this week is ‘4’. We could do whatever we want but it has to have an element of four in it. I decided to make 4-patches, and my first plan was to put them in the four corners. Here is how my quilt ended up:

Read on to find out how it got there.

I also planned to incorporate more of that Northcott watery, bubbly, shimmery fabric I’d used on either side of the fish in round 4. Why not use it as is? It’s got great movement and picks up on the turquoises as well as the reedy pink and brown fabric used in rounds 2 and 4.

The problem is that this fabric is just 10” x WOF strips. I only had a couple left of the three or four Sarah sent to me as a prize one year for participating in Hands2Help. I believe they may be samples because they’re pinked along the edges. I wanted the flowing lines in the fabric to be vertical so on went the thinking (and figuring and calculating) cap. I want this to be a baby-size quilt so with two rounds left and a quilt that measures 29.5” x 34.5” I didn’t want to add more than about 10” total. That would mean about 5" per side for the last two rounds.

Long story short, I went with 4” 4-patches which worked well with the 4” fish and square-in-a-square blocks in round 4. I decided to put two in the centres of each side to help take up inches. I didn’t like the way the 4-patches would look on the top of my SiaS round so I decided to just put this round on three sides only. 

Then I didn’t care for the unbalanced look of the SiaS round at the top with the 4-patches at the bottom and somewhere along the way of ruminating, I thought why not make a heart at the bottom? So that’s what I did, adding strips of the turquoise fabric on either side..

When it came to the vertical sides, I ran into serious trouble. I only had 10” height, remember, and I wanted the flowing lines to be vertical along the sides and no seams. This fabric is ombré, and the set I got is cut from the same repeat so next to impossible to match the lines to hide seams. 

Solution? Put more 4-patches in the centre which took up another 8". Two should do it. Nope. Not quite. Three inches short to be exact. The water fabric would finish at 9.5" times two is 19" + 8" = 27" plus the cornerstone 4-patches is 35.5" and I needed 38.5".

Now what?

I thought of sewing in a rectangle of one of the orange fabrics from one of the big centre fish and started hunting. Nope. Every bit of both is gone. I even looked in my orange and yellow strips bin—nada. But that is where I spied a strip of that fish fabric. Eee! Maybe it would work? It was barely 2.5” wide though. 

On went the thinking cap and pawing through scraps and stash. Aha! Found a scrap of the fishnet fabric in orange. Another ombré fabric that runs from turquoise to coral, this one became pillow shams. Here is an in-progress shot of them from 2016. The post is here if you want to see the shams.

Tidal Lace fabric

I had used a scrap of the turquoise in round 1, the signature block, so I thought this was a perfect find. So I sewed 1/2” on either side of the fish scrap between those side 4-patches. 

So my elements of four are:

The 4-patches in the four corners. 

Four 4-patches along each side of the quilt. 

The pink heart at the bottom is a 4-patch block.

My quilt now measures 37.5” x 38.5”. For round 6, my plan is to only add 2-3" per side. We'll see how that works out!

In other news I’ve been plugging away at my leaders and enders pinwheel blocks and have a set of purple done:

They really are cute, random threads (why don’t you see them until you post the photo?!) and all. 

Xena got her stitches out from the two lumps removal sites on Thursday morning. She was so good but we had to wait 40 minutes as they were running very late! She just has a couple of tiny scabs on the two wounds which will fall  off naturally. She was exhausted most of the rest of the day poor girl. She’s lost about ten pounds in the past seven weeks, not good. She is eating almost back to normal though and has only one more antibiotic pill on Friday breakfast. She will be on her heart meds probably for the rest of her life.  

Dr. Hailey LOVED her pink coat! So does Xena.