Postage Stamp Quilt: A Reveal At Last!

Hello!  It's time for the long-overdue final reveal of my Postage Stamp Quilt project!

This quilt is a beast!  It's made up of 3,190 squares, cut at 2" and finishing at 1.5".  It measures approximately 86x86 and is backed in flannel, so it is heavy and delightful for snuggling two on the couch.  I'm actually surprised that none of the kids have claimed it for their beds yet because it is in constant demand in the family room.

When I started this quilt in January 2022 I set out some rules for myself:

1. No black or low volume fabrics.  I want this to be colorful!

This was mostly successful.  There's black on some of the prints and some of them are very light-colored.  If I were to make this type of quilt again, I would also leave out the grays and browns because they muddy it up a little bit.  Some of the navy and maroon prints read as black from a distance too.

2. Use solids!

Yes, plenty of solids mixed in here.

3. Fabrics can be used more than once.

Also done!  Many fabrics were used multiple times in this quilt.  I had an organization system so that if I cut a charm square into four squares, those four squares would be evenly distributed throughout the quilt. Some fabrics are in every section of the quilt (more on that below) and some fabrics are only in the quilt once.

4. The project has a hard end date of January 1, 2023 for piecing.  I don't want it to drag out forever.

I finished piecing the top on January 3rd!  Only two days past the deadline is basically early!

Not too bad if I do say so myself.  After I finished piecing the quilt, I decided to get a little help with the basting.  I was worried about pulling at all those tiny seams and pulling it off of square.  Luckily, my longarm quilter is willing to baste my quilts for me.  I got it back from her by the end of January and February was spent quilting away.  I normally pin baste and it was very nice not having to stop for pins!

The thick black line is her basting stitches and the colorful line is my quilting!  This spool of variegated thread has been hanging around my sewing room forever, and I used it for all the top stitching.  On the bottom, I used up bobbins that were almost gone and mini spools of thread from subscription boxes.

I started by quilting a quarter inch to the right of every fifth line, then repeated this on the left of every centered line between where I had already quilted.  Next, I removed all the basting stitches and did the same thing in the opposite direction.  Once the quilt sandwich was stabilized, I filled in all the other quilting lines.  It actually went faster than I expected!

With breaks to work on other projects, it took me about a month to finish all the quilting. I popped on a black-on-black polka dot binding and the quilt was done!  I staged a mini-photoshoot in our basement and got some cute pictures of it on the bed down there.

I pulled out the best accessories for this photo: Jenny, my Cabbage Patch doll who is wearing a dress sewn by my great-grandmother in the early 1990s and the lamp I received from a random child at my second grade birthday party.  Up close, there is plenty to look at in all the little squares.  I mentioned solids above, but there are blenders, fussy cut squares, and miscellaneous prints as well.

So what happened between March and now?  I couldn't come up with a nice "neutral" location to photograph the quilt.  Because there was so much going on, I didn't want a busy background.  My city started building a new park shelter in April and when I realized one side was just a 2-story tall black metal wall, I knew that was where I wanted to take the final photos.  So I waited patiently for eight months before taking the photo at the beginning of the post.  I'm sure you'll see more quilt photos at this location in the future!

I'd like to close with some tips for making a quilt like this in case you're interested in making one for yourself.  

1. Decide on the size of squares you want to use.  I knew I wanted to use mini and regular charm squares, but I feel like they aren't always straight.  So I decided to cut all my squares out at 2". 

2. Piece your blocks in a manageable size.  Since my project was meant to last a year, I took my desired height and divided it by 12.  This resulted in each monthly stripe needing to be 5 squares high.  I used this number to piece 5x5 squares.  I pieced the squares using web piecing for speed.

3. Have a rough plan for the color layout.  I wanted the colors to look random, but also evenly distributed, so I made sure that each color appeared once in each 2 column set (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, gray).  The square was filled in with whatever color I felt was underrepresented in that area.  This wasn't a hard and fast rule however, sometimes I would skip a color, which contributed to the overall randomness of the quilt top.

4. Stay organized.  If I cut a charm square into four squares, I didn't want the squares to be too close to each other in the final layout.  The same went for a scrap of fabric leftover after I cut something for a different project.  I had a pile for each month and I would distribute the square equally among the piles (for example, a charm square cut into four squares might go into months 2, 5, 8, and 11).  It was nice having a starter pile of squares for each month.

5. Start in a different spot. I alternated the starting point of each row.  Sometimes I worked left to right, sometimes right to left, and sometimes from the middle out.  It's normal to grab for favorite fabrics first and this distributed them more evenly throughout the quilt top.

6. All fabrics were welcome as long as they met the color profile.  If a fabric was too ugly for this quilt, it went in the trash.  If I couldn't bear to use it as a 2" square in a super busy quilt, I was never going to use it so there was no reason to hang onto it.

And that's it!  I'm off to cuddle under my warm flannel quilt while I plan out my next project.  Thanks for stopping by!