Friday 18 February 2011

V & A medallion inspired quilt - progress update


Another two borders added and a third made.

The slanted rectangles border is the one where I needed that extra fabric - the triangles on the end of the border strips are slightly larger than those along the sides.

The squares on point border suffered some kind of miscalculation and it ended up exactly half a unit short. The original quilt had a double diamond border at this point, but I wanted to simplify the design and make better use of charm squares (5in squares). The original also had those half square triangles at the ends. I thought I'd worked it out so I wouldn't have those, which might have worked if I'd left the charm squares as the full 5in, but I trimmed them to 4 1/2in so the finished squares are just 4in - I think I mixed up measurements for the diagonals across the squares between the finished and the cut measurements and did the same with the red triangles along the edge. This meant the whole border was slightly narrower than anticipated, so I added a 1in finished dark solid border right round, so the next border - nine patch blocks on point - will still fit. On the plus side, the solid border helps to control the bias edges on those red triangles (when I remake this in Moda's 'Authentic', I'll cut them so they are on the straight grain).

2 comments:

Helen from Hobart said...

"some kind of miscalculation" is minimal stuff with this kind of quilt. The original maker probably had'nt done Maths at all - it was a "boys only thing" back then, hence the bits of blocks crashing into the corner stones. Knowing this it amazes me how few stuff ups they made.
I think we need to forget our "it's got to be perfect" mentality when embarking on this kind of project.

Susan Briscoe said...

Yes, I shouldn't really try to remove all the quirks!

It is amazing when you think about the maths - how did people work out the length of the diagonal on a square without a calculator? Urm, probably by drawing it and measuring - which, when you think about it, is so much more sensible than always reaching for the calculator :-)!

The rectangular wedge border is one of those where there's no logical place to stop. Having a complete unit on each end makes one of the end edge triangles oversized and too dominant, so chopping a bit off, like the original maker did, looks much better.