Making something better by accident

Sometimes when you start on a project you have an idea of what the finished product will look like but end up with something entirely different. Several years ago, I was planning a spinning stars quilt from a block I had seen. I had chosen some fun and funky fabrics. I packed them up and headed off to a quilt retreat. It was January, and it was the year that the Indianapolis Colts won the Superbowl.

Late on Saturday night, a playoff game was on the TV and I decided I would cut out the pieces for the quilt. I took my templates and rotary cutter and started cutting away. I was evidently not paying complete attention to my cutting, as I discovered I had one of my templates upside down.

This was how the block was supposed to look. I had cut the white sections with the template upside down. All the other pieces had been cut with the templates the right side up, and I didn’t have enough of the white fabric to cut them the “right” way.

So now what?

I had plenty of the other fabrics, so I flipped the templates over and re-cut the pieces and started assembling the blocks. I figured I would have to find something to substitute for the white fabric and do something different with those blocks. My original design idea had been to make a simple layout of 16 blocks, some with the green dot fabric as the pin wheel and some with a striped fabric.

When I got home, I was looking in my stash of fabric to find something to use to finish the blocks, and found a fat quarter of the white fabric! A fat quarter is a piece about 18 inch by 21 inch. It was enough to make up the missing pieces.

Next steps

I had to decide how to lay out the quilt. I had twice as many blocks, and the stars were spinning in two directions. After several tries, I decided on a plan, one that had some large areas that I could add quilting. Here’s the finished quilt!

I used all the stars spinning one way in the center and the rest around the outside.

Quilting

I wanted to do quilting with lots of curves to counter all of the straight lines in the blocks. I also had football on my mind a bit, so I created a design and made templates for marking the quilt.

Using the templates, I marked out my design. In the borders, I overlapped the larger template to get the ribbon effect. Two smaller templates were used to create the circles in the triangular spaces.

The front and back of the quilt. I just outlined the blocks when quilting them.

And my quilt “Happy Accident” was made. It’s one of my favorites.