I am making a panel quilt right now. I just finished some 8" pinwheels and the rest of the fabrics with just be borders.

Have you checked Keepsake Quilts for ideas?

I just want to say I totally understand – I bought two of those fairy panels a few years back because they were so pretty, but it was hard as heck to figure out what to do with them. They are not a good proportion – too tall and narrow. Fortunately, others have given you some good ideas on how to flesh out a quilt. But I do feel your frustration!

Try the library. You can check out books for free. That's how I got started quilting.

Not fairies, but princesses. Here's the Disney princess quilt that I made for my DGD. This was the first panel first scrappy quilt that I have done. Hope this sparks your creative juices.

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This pattern is called Spotlight. Also a pattern called Sidelights which is also great for panels.

I have been going thru all my old Quiltmaker magazines. yesterday i came across an article about how to make your panels bigger. I copied it to save it! I looked on the QM website but the pdf they have is not coming up. Here are their suggestions:

add spacer strips- dont be afraid to add them just to the sides. Some of those panels are long and skinny. If you add spacer strips on the sides, you can then add blocks in a border. You could also do the same if you need length-add them top and bottom. Or you can make the whole thing the right size to add blocks as a border if you put a border all the way around. Sorry..there will be math involved!

-if you just need a bit more, add extra blocks down one side...or down the side and across the bottom. This makes your panel off center and adds some interest.

I wish I could drop a link in here for that page. It kinda fired my interest...and made me look at panels with a bit more interest! I will try again. Could be my AOL...its been giving me fits lately.


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I use the panel quilts to practice free motion quilting. Its fun and the finished quilts look good too. I outlined the figures and then did some stippling and just played.
Both quilts were quilted with my Bernina 930.
Sharon in Texas

I did this one round robin style, adding different borders. In places where the math didn't work quite right, I did a plain strip of fabric to get it up to size, the black one that is around the center panel, the leaf one that is around the pieced trees and the fish print and fishing lure print that are in between the LC blocks and the fish blocks. You can easily adapt common blocks to fit your panel or adapt your panel to fit an evenly divisible number that fits your block size. You can even expand to drafting your own. That is what I did with my tree blocks in this quilt. They were paper pieced so once I drew my pattern, all I had to was copy it for the PP.

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go to allpeoplequilts website, they have a section on panels quilts with different borders, placements etc. I love panels and I always get good ideas/patterns from them and it's free