I’m a member of the Undercover Quilters guild in Brookhaven, PA. It’s a wonderful guild, filled with supportive, passionate members that are incredibly active in service projects for community groups and organizations. The monthly speakers at our guild meetings have been educational and informative, teaching me so much about different techniques and designs I had never before considered. The guild runs an annual retreat, a quilt show every other year, as well as an annual quilting challenge!

For 2024-2025, my guild announced that the quilt challenge would be a panel challenge. These were the criteria presented at the November 2024 guild meeting:

Choose a panel, divide the image and/or border it in a unique way. The size of finished quilt is up to you! (no bags.) You should be able to see the original image (even if divided). Do not cut it into random squares where the original image is hidden.
What is a panel? Usually, it is purchased by the panel and not by the yard. It’s one large image with no repeats. (This is not a large print challenge.) Sometimes, the panels are sold with coordinating fabric. It can extend from selvage to selvage, or it can be subdivided its smaller panels.

At first, I wasn’t going to participate in the challenge. I had never made a panel quilt in the past to begin with, and I wasn’t planning to head out and purchase a panel. In an interesting twist, it turns out I already had a panel to work with! While going through and trying to organize my fabric stash at home (thanks to all of the store-closing purchases from Joann Fabrics), I came across a beautiful panel I had purchased in Alaska.

Alaskan artist Evon Zerbetz designed a fabric line called Sea Life Collection, manufactured by Clothworks and only sold in Alaskan fabric shops. The main panel, 24 inches by 44 inches, has six animal portraits and two panel sections. The Sea Life Collection also includes an additional fabric with two border strips and eight sea creature “medallions” (small circle portraits), and a separate water fabric available in blue or aqua.

Panel (left) and border fabric (right) in the Evon Zerbetz Sea Life Collection.

The panel is beautiful as-is, I didn’t want to cut it up! But I knew I wanted to do more than just put a border around these fun animal blocks. Once I cut the six squares out of the panel, leaving a bit of a black border around each, I played with several layouts and designs. I really liked the individual circles of animals, so I cut those out and decided to appliqué them on to some of the Sea Life water print fabric.

I was also keeping in mind the timeline I had to work with – even though the panel challenge was announced in November, I didn’t rediscover this panel and begin working with it until April! Fortunately, the deadline for the guild’s panel challenge was moved to June instead of May (phew!), and I was only required to have the top quilted and not the entire piece finished. Still, I moved forward with the intention of completing the quilt ASAP, as there are plenty of quilt projects I have lined up for the summer. I began the cutting on April 23, finished the quilt top on April 24, did the actual quilting on April 28, and added the binding on May 2. Here is the finished product!

Can you see the wave I stitched into the black border around each of the squares? One other feature I added to the quilt and Evon Zerbetz’s fabric is the double border of dark blue and glittery yellow. These are the official colors of Alaska, displayed on the Alaskan state flag with a blue background and gold stars. The quilt measures 40 inches by 40 inches, was completed May 2, 2025, and is the 157th quilt I have completed.

You may have noticed the octopus square from the original panel did not make it into the finished quilt. I decided to make the octopus into its own mini-quilt, which will soon be hanging in my office at Penn State Brandywine.

I look forward to sharing this quilt with my guild members and seeing all of their creative panel quilts!