Sea to Shining Sea

The quilt on my bed is the largest I’ve ever made. It has 12” blocks representing each of the 50 states except one. The math for a 49-block quilt is easy: seven rows and seven columns. But I couldn’t conjure up a way to use 50 blocks in the same quilt. What would that even look like? Would it have twenty-five rows and two columns? The blocks were from the Quilts Etc. free block-of-the-month class in 2006 and 2007. Along with the 50 patterns, we were given enough fabric to make a dozen blocks. I used scraps from my own stash to make the other 38. When it came time to set the blocks into a quilt top, I tossed the one I liked the least into a pile of orphan blocks. I think it sat there until last summer, when it was pressed into service for the Americana top http://mombowe.blogspot.com/2016/07/americana-sampler.html made for the hospital quilters.