Veterans Mystery Quilt - Clue 5 - The last clue!

It’s now time to put it all together! I’m going to show you how to lay out the blocks and you can assemble the top any way you wish. You can do it in rows or columns or you can start with the center and add the blocks as borders in the way I’m going to show it arranged.

 

The Veteran’s Quilt (48 x 60) is constructed from just the blocks that you have made.  At the end I will give you some border measurements to make the quilt larger for a Quilt of Valor.

 

 

The only tricky part is the center. Here’s the layout using the blocks from clue 1. The 2 blocks with all 4 corners in fabric 1 go where the green arrows are. Lay out the other blocks paying attention to the points where the fabric 3 pieces touch. See the yellow lines in my diagram? That shows that the fabric 2 pieces all line up on the same diagonal. Make sense? Now you have the center set right.

 

 

Now add the blocks from clue 3. There’s no tricky placement here.

 

Finally, add the blocks from clue 5. These do have an arrangement but I think you can easily see it from the diagram. Sew it all together and your quilt is done……unless you are adding borders in the next clue.

  

Here’s my veteran’s quilt version.

 

 

Here's my Mom's version. (Of course she got the clue early!)

Quilting and binding considerations: Since I have pressed all of my seams open I will quilt this quilt with an allover pattern on my longarm. Stitch in the ditch would not work well with pressed open seams. If you are quilting this on a DSM you might quilt an all-over filler type motif or a simple meander. Quilting diagonal straight lines would also work great.

 I will bind this quilt in fabric 3 (dark blue).

 

My second quilt is going to be a Quilt of Valor so it needs to be bigger. Here’s what I designed.

 

The first border is 1.5” finished (uses 5/8 yard, strips are cut 2” wide)

The second border is 4” finished (uses 1 3/8 yards, strips are cut 4 ½” wide)

The outside border is 3” finished which makes the quilt 65” x 81” (uses 1 yard fabric, strips are cut 3 ½” wide)

 

 

I was making this quilt from stash so I had to work with the yardage that I had. I was completely out of the 2 light fabrics so I had to make do with 2 borders. The narrow black border finishes at 1” and the print border finishes at 5”.

Like all good quilters you, like me, will work with what you have to make the quilt work for you.

I hope you have enjoyed this mystery project as much as I have. If your quilt is going to be donated to Country School Quilters for our veteran’s project you can send your quilt, binding and backing to me and we will quilt and bind it for the project. We will also provide the backing. Also everyone donating a mystery quilt top will be entered in a drawing for some hand dyed fabric. If you send a finished quilt you will have 2 entries in the drawing!

 

Please share your quilt in our Flickr group:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/2170899@N25/