How to Make Do When Quilting Doesn’t Go According to Plan

If you’ve spent any time sewing, and especially quilting, you know that sometimes you have to undo, cut apart, start over or otherwise learn to make do when quilting doesn’t go to plan.

Many quilters call their seam ripper Jack, and talk about having a date with Jack when they need to take apart a large project.  He’s Jack the Ripper, see.

I learned a much less murdery way to talk about taking apart seams.  The seam ripper is a frog, because it rip-it, rip-its.

Either way, learning how to make do when quilting is an important part of sewing, because it’s not IF you have to pivot in this craft, it’s just a matter of when.

Peanut Butter Quilt

This is the Peanut Butter Quilt, a FREE quilt pattern by Then Came June.

I had this fun fat quarter bundle of fabrics in bright pinks, purples, yellows and whites, full of bugs and snakes and birds.  This fabric bundle was a Christmas gift from my brother.

 

When I saw this new pattern, I knew it was perfect for to show off the larger scale prints from the bundle.

I had a black and purple fabric in just the same shade of purple as the background of the bird print, and then added some black and white stripes and a few tonal fabrics in the same colors to round out my fabric pull.

How to Make Do When Quilting – Quilt Size

The first change I made, was to make a smaller quilt size.  

Since this was a free pattern, it only came in one quilt size, and was much larger than I needed or wanted to make.

Part of learning how to make do when quilting is to cut blocks (in this case two rows and two columns) from the pattern, and then re-count how many of each piece is needed.

For this quilt, I used the digital coloring page provided with the quilt, and crossed out rows and columns with my finger.

How to Make Do When Quilting – Fabric Requirements

Part of the reason I made my quilt smaller was that I wanted all of my sashing to be the same fabric, the black and white stripe, but I didn’t have enough yardage for the larger size.

Have you noticed, as you’ve been reading and scrolling past pictures, that my black and white striped sashing are NOT all the same black and white fabric?

Hopefully not!

I used three different stripes, each of varying thickness, in place of one fabric.  My hope is that it wasn’t noticeable, and that if it was, it looked both fantastic and intentional.

To make it look intentional, I put the thickest stripes in the bottom right corner and the thinnest stripes in the upper left corner, with mid-size stripes (the fabrics I had the most yardage of) filling in the rest.

My hope is that this tutorial will help you to be ready to make do when quilting any of my patterns or tutorials.

Baby Quilt for Sale

This darling quilt did not have an intended recipient in mind when I started working on it, and is available for sale in my Etsy Shop.

It’s backed in a fun striped black and white flannel, quilted with a dark pink thread, and bound in scrappy fabrics from the quilt itself.