This block sits smack in the exact middle of the quilt, and Paulette had chosen a fabric for this block that clearly felt meaningful for her:

Unfortunately I only have one square inch of her meaningful fabric. Also, the one square inch has a person on it, and the block design sort of reminds me of a target sight … so I decided I didn’t want to use any fabric with people or animals on it for my version of the center block.

I spent many months searching for a fabric that had meaning to me, and that would fit with the color scheme of the quilt. In the quilting software, I put another fabric in the center as a placeholder, but I wanted to wait to sew the real thing until I found just the right fabric. I’d bring home scraps from yard sales, or that had been given to me by fellow quilters, but none of them seemed quite right.

Then at my last quilting retreat, 18 months into the project, I spotted this green zigzag fabric on the sale table. At first glance, the print seemed too big, but I had an idea for fussy cutting the design that I felt just might work. I invested an entire dollar in this small piece of fabric, and brought it home. From a quilting perspective, that was a rough retreat, but at least this one thing had gone right. I’d found my special center block fabric.

I cut out a template of the quarter circle and placed it on the fabric. My plan was to fussy cut so that one repeat of the green zigzag would fill almost all of each quarter circle. It was going to be tight (and I hadn’t realized that all the zigzags were not exactly the same size), but I felt like it could work.

Doubling down on the meaningfulness, I stitched the block together at my next quilting retreat, last weekend. Plus then I could solicit my fellow retreat-goers for feedback on my fussy-cutting idea. I got the green light, and set to work putting this block together.

Drunk with power after my last bout of seam elimination, I opted to not have microscopically-small red triangles in the corners, but merge them together with the red pieces next to them. I think this was a good move, as the seam allowances would have been bigger than the triangles.

The block went together reasonably well, especially considering that I was racing against the clock on the last day of retreat. I got it done just before time to leave, packed up, and went home.

After I got home, I cut out a small piece of the fabric and scanned it in to put it in the Dear Jane software, so the center block in my digital version of the quilt would match the actual fabric used. Unfortunately, the way the software uses fabric swatches, it just displays a big piece of the lightest green part of the zigzag for the center square. It looks slightly bluish and seems way out of place with the other fabrics in the digital version.

So now I’m doubting myself. Is it too bluish of a green? Or does it blend in okay? I took this picture with it surrounded by other blocks, to try to get some perspective. What do you all think? Let me know in the comments.

It may stand out color-wise, but I do feel like I’ve finally found a center block fabric that packs enough meaning for me. Now I want to find a place in the quilt to use that one square inch of Paulette’s center fabric, so that her story is stitched into the quilt too.