Not So Merrily

I've been working on the blocks for my Merrily Christmas quilt steadily. (Some might say obsessively, but you know, tomayto, tomahto.) By last Friday I had all twelve blocks done. After the red and grey ones I showed in the last post about this quilt, I finished the two brown and four green ones:

I pinned all the blocks to my design wall so I could work on arrangements and see what I had. I planned each block individually working with the limited fabric I had but after seeing them all together, I made a few changes.

One thing I did was change the position of the light and dark on the corner units of this block. (It's the top left block in the picture above):

I also switched out the center of one of the green blocks where I had used grey. I realized I could use white there instead. (No, I don't know why I didn't think of that in the first place.) It brightened up the block a lot.

I also swapped the centers of the two grey blocks (link to picture). The center of each block used the same fabric as the outer corners. By switching the centers, I got a little more variety within the blocks.

You can see the animals inserted as
blocks in the magazine.

Once that was done, I worked on the animals from the panel. Since the animals appeared in this very quilt pattern in the magazine, I didn't expect any more trouble than making sure I cut out a proper square.

Well. Not quite.

The four animals came on a panel of fabric a yard long. This makes it easy for shops to sell one yard and everyone gets all four animals. Now a little simple math. A yard is 36". Since the animals are printed 2x2 on the yard, each animal is half a yard, which is 18". My blocks are 18.5" (unfinished). I'm sure that was simple enough for you to notice that my 18" animals blocks weren't going to be large enough to be sewn to the 18.5" blocks. I let that realization sit over night.

I had a few small scraps from cutting the height down to 18.5". Fabric is 42-44" wide so the animals were about 21" tall. Cutting them to 18.5" gave me an inch and a half if I was lucky. (I know the math doesn't work there, but you lose some of the width from squaring the block and removing the selvage.)

I used the four widest strips to add width to the blocks even though that would add an extra seam. (Boo!)

Of course, the strips were only 18" long so I had to piece in a patch to the patch to get the full 18.5" length:

But once you have one seam, what's adding one more? (That was sarcasm in case my sarcasm font isn't working.)

I put them all up on the wall to see how I liked it:

I can get over the extra seams, but one of the strips wasn't really wide enough. The text on the edge of the block below will mostly get caught up in the seam, but there's a line printed to the left of the text and that won't be in the seam.

I put it on the back side, but since it's a light fabric it will be visible on the front. I'm not sure I want to live with that.

As an alternate arrangement, I could put all four animals in the center of the quilt. With a frame around them and between them, they would be wide enough.

I could use white for the frame or I have some yardage of one of the green fabrics from this line. I don't like this option as much as the first layout, but it's always good to realize you have options.

PS: Aren't these animals adorable!? So cute!