Putting It All Together

What do you think of the letters all together? Boy, my Y and Z certainly trailed off didn't they. Very wee. K looks sickly as well. I could always make them over again, but I refuse to give in to that perfectionist impulse.

I decided to keep the sampler quilt small. I could make it grow by adding the small letters, the numbers, a saying, my whole name, some pieced house blocks. It's very easy to keep going, but I'm not going to. Instead I'll demonstrate how to put it together.

The first step is to decide on a layout.

After playing with borders and layout, I made all the letters 2 7/8" high. Some got cut down and others had background fabric added to their top, bottom or both and then got cut down. You do not have to work this precisely. You could get them all vaguely to the height you want and after you join them together lop off any extra.

The letters are obviously going to have a hard time fitting on that bottom row if I include six of them, esp when the W is so wide, so how about if I slip the Z down onto the bottom row? Oh, and I decided to make my initials and the last two digits of the year as well. Now it's really crowded on the bottom row again, but I could prune down the b, r, and zero.

Here's another option, to have X Y Z on the bottom row. I could also jam those over to the left and start making numbers until I hit the end of the line. You'll notice in this example I've now got six letters per row instead of the five above.

Finished Sampler Quilt Top

Next is a photo of all the rows joined together. By the way, you'll notice that I didn't decide on a set length for these rows and precut them. Instead I folded each row over, matching the beginning and end of the letters, and marked the "middle" that way with a pin. I joined "middle" to "middle" and didn't worry about the actual length of the row.

The next step was to even up the sides of this piece. I wasn't measuring, just trying to get it straight, and all lined up with the shortest row on each side.

I did end up having to whack a bit off the bottom row, where the '05 was sticking way down. I wouldn't have minded if there was a straight, angled line across the bottom, but that was a bubble. I then sewed 2" strips of background fabric to the top and bottom.

So that's that, the middle bit is done, now all that is left is the border. I consider adding a tiny red accent border, followed by the wider green border. No. I decide on a 3" finished green border, since 3" is more or less the size of the letters along with a bit of the background. I cut out the border strips and lay them down surrounding the letters.

Ugh. I was hoping for a cute small quilt and that is just not what I am getting. So after all that sewing on of extra background fabric, I decide I don't like it and whack down all the sides so that I'll end up with roughly 1/4" worth of background after I sew on the border. That did the trick. I hated all that extra white, but removing it makes the quilt look cute again. The top is 20" by 23".

So here it is, the finished sampler quilt top. If you double click on the photo, you'll get a really good large picture of it.

Sampler Layout