If I take another kit to make a quilt of valor quilt from my quilt group, before I start to take it, I’ll double-check the contents to see if all of the pieces are there in the amounts and sizes that are needed. If I don’t, then I need to be prepared for potential headaches like the one presented this past weekend.
I hate to be one to complain, but honestly, if you provide kits, then the instructions should match, and you should have enough fabric (and pieces) to make the quilt top. And really, it shouldn’t be “just barely enough.”
Unfortunately it wasn’t enough. What should have been 2 yards of fabric according to the pattern was only about 63 inches before I trimmed/squared it to get ready to cut strips/squares. So I ended up cutting them at 12 inches each instead of 12.5 inches. I could have dealt with that and moved on if that was the only issue. It wasn’t.
The pattern called for those squares to be snowballed. I looked at the rest of the fabrics in the kit, and the only one that had enough pieces to snowball the 15 blocks (so, 60 pieces) was either a 4.5 inch stack of whites, or a 3 inch stack of blues. The pattern said to snowball with 4 inch squares. Um… there were no pieces that size in the kit. So I thought maybe the person just didn’t cut the right size. I decided to use the 3 inch stack to save the 4.5 inch stack for the alternate 15 blocks (a 9-patch “floating star”). Now the 3 inch stack of squares (which weren’t exactly square, but that’s a rant for another time) was depleted.
Of course, that was my next mistake. I looked at the instructions for the alternate block again. Of course, those didn’t match from one page to another, and didn’t match what was in the kit. On one page, it said to use 1 4.5″ square center of star, 8 4.5″ squares background, and 8 2.5″ squares star points. On another page, it said to use 8 3.5″ squares star points. Meanwhile, there are zero kit fabrics that have or had 120 4.5″ pieces. Seriously, I wanted to give up. But I’d already started cutting.
So I dove into my stash and chose a tan fabric that was similar in shade to the print used in the snowball. I cut 120 pieces of that. Then I found some scraps of other fabrics – some with stars, some with flags, and the one white from the kit that had about 64 pieces, and cut the rest of the pieces that I needed from those. I hope that when I put those together randomly with the snowball blocks, everything will look okay, and I’ll just consider it another lesson learned.