Kathleen, now my client, lives about 35 miles from my country home, so we did our planning first by phone, then by email. Not a sewer she did not have a "stash" to go to, so she purchased various quantities of fabric ranging from 1/4 yd to several yards and labeled each as to her intent for the fabric. Most were dark plaids, blues and burgundy with one light blue plaid, a blue floral and two yellows. She had decided to use the floral and one of the yellows sparingly.
The quilt shop graciously offered to allow me to take the sample home to measure the blocks, etc. I measured, photographed it and returned it to the shop. The piece measured 36 x 36 inches square.
Then I learned Kathleen wanted hers to be 54 x 60! And she didn't want any log cabin type blocks as the original had. Well I could omit those, but I would have to plan something to add those extra six inches. A little sketching and figuring gave me the basic plan for this scrappy quilt. Ten inch blocks using 5 inch pinwheel sub-blocks,with 1 1/4 inch sashing, and a 3 1/2 inch final border would yield 54 x 54. Some scrappy flying geese and another row of sashing would come out to 54 x 60!
The block.
The pinwheels were cut first as 3 inch strips, then into 3 inch squares. To achieve accurate points, I used the halfsquare triangle method as in my June 2001 article. After the pinwheels were sewn together, four to a block, (sixteen blocks in all) and the sashing added, (cut 1 3/4 inch strips), I measured and found the blocks and sashing came to 46 1/4 inches both width and length. The 3 1/2 inch scrappy border was going to work for the width Kathleen wanted.
Now the size of the flying geese. This row and a row of sashing had to come out to about 6 inches. The sashing minus seam allowance would be 1 1/4, I needed 4 3/4 inches more to get to 60 inches long. Considering the binding would add a speck more length, I made the geese rectangles 4 1/2 inches long and the light color sections 2 1/4 inches square, sewing them onto the ends of the scrappy rectangles again as halfsquare triangles.
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