Lemonade from Lemons

I'm knee deep in preparations for Sewing Summit, which is in LESS THAN A WEEK! Six months of anticipation is almost over! All my fabric is purchased and most of my garment fabrics have been prewashed. Tonight's task was to cut the pieces for the mini quilt we'll be making in my curves class.  After hours of auditioning prints, I selected my fabric the other night. Because the pieces are so small, I wanted to choose as many prints as I could out of my scrap collection. Here's what I ended up with:

In the end, only the main print (speaking of which, does anyone know the name of this print?) and two of the others are truly scraps. I started cutting my pieces, using the agenda that I'd saved on my Macbook a while back. During a snack break, I logged into the Summit Google group to see what had been posted in the last few days and found a thread about the Curves class.  I'd had a vague recollection that this thread existed but hadn't given it much thought. To my chagrin, the instructor had posted UPDATED cutting instructions! Gah!!! I'd cut the wrong sized pieces!

Full disclosure: the agenda currently posted on the Sewing Summit website contained the correct cutting instructions as well. It was totally my fault that I was referencing an older version of the agenda. It didn't occur to me that the one I'd saved might not be the latest.

The good news is that most (but not all!) of the new pieces were smaller than the ones I'd cut so I didn't waste too much fabric. But it was still extremely annoying.

My next task was to cut the piece for the back of the quilt. The instructions called for a piece that was 18.5 inches square. Think about that for a moment. How many inches are there in a yard? There are 36 inches.  Which means that the short edge of a fat quarter is only 18 inches. Which means that to get an 18.5 inch square, I would need to buy a cut that is more than a half yard.

Brief aside: some of the fabric I buy in person here in Canada is cut by the metre (and thus 39 inches wide), but many quilt shops here cut by the yard and all of the fabric I purchase online is also by the yard.

Now, the vast majority of my stash is fat quarters which meant I didn't have anything 18.5 inches wide on hand. How annoying is that?! When I realized this, I was not impressed. In fact, I was down right irritated. Couldn't the designer have made the quilt just a tad smaller?! But then, it occured to me that (d'uh!) the back didn't have to be all the same fabric.  C'mon, who doesn't love a scrappy back?

I whipped this together lickety split. It's not fabulous, but it meets requirements and used up even more of my scraps. All I have left it to make the binding (I think I'll use the teal jewels print) and I'll be all set for curves class. Hooray!