Home » Home & Style » Quilting » My Millennium Quilt Experience

My Millennium Quilt Experience

© Jeanne Walsh

Did you get into the "millennium swap" craze? And have you actually used those 2000 three inch charms to make a quilt top? Here is my experience:

In about October of 1999 I began to search for swappers to get 2000 three inch squares to make a millennium quilt. I didn't realize that 2000 three inch squares would make a really BIG quilt. After the search for swapping partners and cutting over 80 sets of 25 squares to send out, I actually received more than 2000. Then it was time to work out a pattern. That was when it dawned on me I would have a quilt big enough to cover Texas if I used the full 3 inch square! Finally an Internet friend showed me how she had solved the problem, so these are the blocks I used.

Have you read my June article on halfsquare triangles? I decided to use that method of piecing accurate triangles for my millennium quilt. The quilt blocks would be made up of 16 triangle squares, using 32 of the three inch fabric squares for each block.

The beauty of this plan was it would use 1,984 of my 2000 three inch squares in 62 blocks, leaving 16 for a final block, thus 2000 pieces in the quilt. Setting the blocks 9 x 7, I could piece 32 star blocks, 30 diamond blocks and use the 16 remaining in a 4 x 4 patch to result in 63 blocks, just what I needed. The resulting quilt would be 90 x 70 without borders. Any width border could be added.

There were fabrics with 2000 printed on them at that time. I received a number of those squares in the swap and used them in the 4 x 4 block.

The first thing to be done was to sort that pile of fabric squares into color families, and within the families into light and dark. And how many afternoons did that take? The two block layouts used the same number of light/dark triangle squares so I was hoping to find about an equal number of lights and darks. Of course that didn't happen so I wound up using lights/mediums and even mediums/darks. Then to draw the diagonal lines needed on umpteen light blocks. All this got quite tedious so I sewed a few and drew a few, etc.

Eventually I got to making the actual blocks. (I might inject here that I got quite bored with 3 inch charms and trianglesquares. You may want to take a break for a few days and work on something else!)

The copyright of the article My Millennium Quilt Experience in Quilting is owned by . Permission to republish My Millennium Quilt Experience in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.