A small diversion

While pondering borders on my mystery quilt, and avoiding the quilt on the long arm, I amused myself with a short diversion. 

Using one set of fabric from my retail therapy last weekend, I put together this quilt.  You may recognize it as a Big Block Quilt.  I drafted the blocks myself, to get maximum usage out of my fat quarters.  In fact, I went a little overboard. I figured I could get 4 9.5" blocks out of each FQ (a Canadian FQ is about 20"x20"), but a couple of them were cut crooked so I was .5" short on 4 of the squares.  Fixed that up with an off-cut from the other edge, and you can hardly notice the extra seam.

I was a bit disappointed. I thought for a while that Electric Quilt had let me down. It said I needed 1 yard of the dark brown, and I knew that I'd purchased 1 meter - so that was 4" more than I needed.  No problem!  But after cutting 16 of the 17 strips I needed, I was 1/2" short for the final strip :(  So I went back to pencil & paper and figured out that I actually needed 38.5" of fabric - more than 1 yard!  But less than the meter I bought - I must have lost almost 2" in shrinkage when I washed it.  I went back to EQ to figure out what went wrong there, because it usually estimates high, not low.  I checked the fabric width (set to 40", check). And then noticed the seam allowance setting - .1". Oops.  Fixed that, and EQ says I needed 1 1/4 yards.  Yes, that's much closer to reality.

Fortunately, I was able to salvage enough length from two of my strips to cut the couple of pieces I needed due to the missing strip. So all ended well!  The rows are attached and first border added now.  And now it sits until I get back to the quilt shop, because I need an outer border fabric.  More shopping!