Happy Accident Quilt

This is the quilt that is the happy result of an interesting series of accidents.

While making the baby boy quilt pictured and discussed in my previous post, I thought that I had miscalculated on how much animal print I needed and was short, so I hurried to the local quilting shop and tried to match the colors in the print as well as I could. I came home with the green flannel.

Well, it turned out that I had not miscalculated after all. When the animal quilt was finished, I was left with a stack of blue, yellow striped, and brown squares, a bit of left over yellow striped fabric, and the unused green.

I decided to use the green and yellow striped fabric to make 6 3/4 inch squares (the same size as the left over blue, yellow, and brown squares). Once the green and yellow squares were sewn, I was going to arrange them geometrically and sew them into a small quilt.

I carefully measured and cut the strips of green and yellow, sew the strips together, ironed them, and discovered that they were 3/4 of an inch too small! Arg. I quickly decided to trim down the blue, yellow, and brown squares. And then I decided to not waste time trying to make the blue and brown stripes the same size (which would require trimming three sides and repositioning the ruler) but to make an asymmetrical look (which only required trimming two sides and positioning my ruler once).

The result? A modern-feeling geometric quilt that is asymmetrical yet balanced. Oh, and no left overs. Yep, the number of quilt squares was perfect, and I didn't even have any awkward strips of unused fabric left! I don't think I could have figured that mathematically if I tried!

Now all I hope is that the person who gets it as a baby quilt likes modern, geometric, rather asymmetrical, groupings of green, blue, brown, and yellow stripes better than they like more traditional baby prints like cute little jungle animals. ; )