Scrappy Two-Colour Quilt in Progress

You may have read about my upcoming Two-Colour Mystery Quilt-along, launching on February 29th.  Can you believe there are already close to 1,000 quilters signed up to participate?  I'm thrilled that I'm not the only one excited about it.

One question I've been asked more than once is whether you have to use a single dark fabric and a single light fabric.  That's how I designed it, but the question made me think beyond that.  What would a scrappy version look like?  I tried to mock it up but I find it hard to colour a scrappy quilt in EQ.  

What's a quilter to do?  Attack actual scraps, of course.

You can see I've restricted my selection to a single color and chose prints that read mostly dark compared to the white I've chosen for my light.   Some of the prints include white in them, but I rejected white-on-red prints that had large white parts, like the large white-on-red dot below.  The white accent was too large.  Where the white dot bled into the background, the line between light and dark wasn't as crisp as I wanted.

I could have chosen assorted white-on-white scraps for my lights as well, but I'm woefully short of white scraps so I'm using yardage of white Grunge that I had on my shelves.

I don't know how well the design would work in scraps of multiple colors, but I'm happy to report that "controlled scrappy" in a single color family is working out really well. 

I need to stop sharing now.  I really, really want to show you what this test looks like up on the design wall, but that would spoil the mystery so I'm stepping away from the computer!  The sewing machine is more fun anyway :)

Happy quilting,

Joanne

Pumpkin Patch Time

Earlier this month my husband and I took an afternoon off and drove out to the local apple orchard/pumpkin patch.  The leaves had not yet turned but the pumpkins were ripe and orange...well, except for those white ones, but I like my pumpkins orange so I ignored the "bleached" ones! I enjoyed my long walk through the corn maze and the field of sunflowers, the wagon ride through the pumpkin patch, and ate a few too many apple donuts.  It was a perfect afternoon and the outing nudged me towards the right frame of mind to enjoy fall instead of grasping at summer.

When I got home I was ready for some fall-themed sewing.  I already had several fall throws featuring leaf blocks, and a trio of table runners showcasing fall fabric and colors, but I didn't have any pumpkin décor.  Freshly inspired by the pumpkin patch, I dug through the orange scraps to see if I could remedy the situation.

I found, happily, that I had more variety in my orange scrap collection than I thought.  I don't know where they all came from, but at this point, I'm not really keeping track.  I just use them!  I spent an evening happily picking out what I thought might suit, then another evening sewing up the cute little pumpkin blocks in this post's first picture.

That took care of the urge to sew up some pumpkins.  I let them just hang out on the design wall, brightening up my studio for a few weeks until last weekend.  At that point I figured if I wanted to use them this fall, I should move the project along. 

I really liked the runner design with prairie point accents that I used for my Canada Day runner this summer,  so I thought I'd try it again for the pumpkins.  This one is a little shorter, with three rather than four blocks, but I think it's perfect for the pumpkins.  The green skinny border doesn't show well in this picture.  It's not as dark as it seems in the picture, and it breaks up the orange quite nicely while tying in with the green stems.

As you can see, it isn't yet quilted.  As always, deciding what to quilt killed the momentum.  After seeing the pretty texture Leanne's tiny stippling added to her Bloom piece, I'm considering using this runner for stippling practice. Or not.  I'm torn!  I really don't stipple well, so I could use the practice, but then I don't want to ruin this runner either, because I think it's kind of cute and it makes me smile.  

While I was pondering the quilting fate of the runner, I made a little detour by the computer to write up a quick pattern for the scrappy pumpkin blocks (not the runner) to share with my newsletter subscribers this weekend.  If you sign up before Saturday, the newsletter with the pattern link should make it to your inbox!

Meanwhile, tell me, what is your favourite fall décor, quilted or otherwise?

Happy quilting!

Joanne

Quilting mom vs sane mom

As I was working my way through green scraps, my daughter sauntered into my quilting corner asking if I had a runner she could use on her dresser.  Apparently, contact lens solution occasionally splatters onto the dresser when she opens the packaging and she would like something to protect the dresser surface.

What's a mom to do?

Sane mom:  Suggest that she could simply take 5 seconds to wipe up the splatter when it happens.

Quilting mom: Root through the scraps for leftovers from daughter's bed quilt and whip up a little matching, improv, quilt as you go runner.

What can I say?  It was an excuse to use up more scraps in my ongoing scrap mitigation project.

Thinking outside the pattern

As you know if you have been reading along these last few weeks, my plans for this year include making a temperature quilt and reducing my stash of scraps.  Just look at what Amy, who blogs at A Quilting Sheep,  has done with my free temperature quilt pattern and scraps.

I had been wondering how to use up my small scraps, and a perfect design was sitting right there on my design wall as my tempearature quilt takes shape.  I can start a whole new quilt, skipping the temperature part for this one but using the block design and layout to use up scraps! The wheels in my head are turning...

Amy has written a great blog post with suggestions for using my free pattern for quilts other than a temperature quilt, and even shares her measurements for larger blocks.  I encourage you to hop over there for inspiration.  Thanks for reaching out to me, Amy, and for thinking outside the pattern!

I might have started a valentine project using my red scraps and Amy's creative nudge...

Scrap Mitigation

I previously stated that one of my quilty goals this year was scrap busting.  Having now assessed the state of my scrap bin, I think that may be an unrealistic name for what I might accomplish.  These are just the little bits.  I also have plastic  shoe boxes of larger scraps sorted by color.

A word to the wise:  never, ever take the lid completely off the scrap bin!  All I wanted were the greens, as that is the Rainbow Scrap Challenge's color this month, but everything else made a break for the floor when the lid came off.

While everything was on the floor I figured I might as well sort it. I bagged each color in two-gallon ziplock bags to keep them sorted and put all except the bag of green scraps back in the bin.  I happily went to work making 16-patch blocks to deplete the pile of green.

I made more after I took this picture.  The count stands at 35 now. I tried very hard to just sew strips together without too much planning.  The color placement is very random and it's making me a little bit nervous about the final product.  Maybe those olive green bits should have been left out, but they are not coming out now!

As these were coming together, I felt very industrious. Just watch me use up those scraps! That feeling lasted until I looked at the supply of green scraps at the end of the day and found that I had hardly made a dent.  This led me to a few decisions:

1.  I won't be busting my scraps this year.  The best I can hope for is scrap mitigation, making the scrap problem a little less daunting.  It is by no means going away! I may have added a few new green scraps already...

2. I do not have the patience to make crumb blocks out of little itty-bitty scraps.  Just slapping strips together to strip piece these 16-patches taxed my patience.

3.  I give myself permission to toss some scraps.  I may toss them into a pillowcase to make a pet bed for the local shelter, but not every scrap needs to be saved.  That mostly applies to small bits (see #2 above), but also to slightly larger bits in fabrics that I just don't like.  I'm not sure how they snuck into the scraps.  Presumably, they came from a project, but I just can't imagine why I would have put them in a project in the first place.  I guess my tastes must have changed.

4. I really don't work well without a plan.  Halfway through making these blocks I just couldn't stand it anymore.  I had to sit down with EQ8 and figure out what I was going to do with them before I kept going!

I might tweak this a little, but I have a direction.  I also have white on white scraps, enough of one grey from trimming backings, and small bits of red/orange/yellow.  I can make this whole top without buying and cutting yardage and thereby adding to the scraps.  I might possibly manage an all-scraps pieced back too.  This might just be a net reduction in total scraps.  Fingers crossed!

Oh dear, those 3 dark greens in a row in the block above are going to bother me now.  How did I not notice before?

Linking up with

Scrap Happy Saturday
Oh Scrap!

Baby Steps (AKA Star Steps) in Bloggers’ Quilt Festival

My second entry in the Blogger’s Quilt Festival is Baby Steps, which I am entering in the small quilts category.  It measures 50 1/2” x 64”.



Until I made Quilter’s Scrapbook (my other BQF entry) I always bought fabric for specific projects and didn’t feel I had enough left of anything that went together to make anything else. I certainly didn’t consider the leftovers a stash. With the success of Quilter’s Scrapbook I was inspired to use up my strings for Sparkling Strings.  That went well, so I was encouraged to head to the bins of leftovers instead of the quilt shop when I needed to make a baby quilt last spring.  Surprise!  I had enough brights and novelty prints to pull this quilt together AND  there was  fabric left over.  I guess I do have a stash after all!  It’s just in mostly smaller pieces.



This quilt just went together effortlessly. Besides the fabric jumping out of my bins and saving me a trip to the shop, the quilting cooperated beautifully.  As I wrote in April, a cardboard circle saved from some packaging was exactly the right size to fit evenly along both the width and length of the border and wrap around the corners with absolutely no fudging required!  How often does that happen?  I used my walking foot to quilt straight lines in the steps and to quilt the half-circles in the borders.  The swirls in the star are free-motion quilted.



I made this as a baby quilt (generously sized for tummy time and big enough for when the baby grows into a toddler) and I love how it turned out. My blogging friend Sandra recently tested the pattern I wrote for this quilt, using “all grown up” fabrics.  You can see her version here.  It got me thinking about alternate colorways and I decided to rename the pattern Star Steps, since it obviously works as a more grown-up quilt too.

Since it was so quick and easy to piece, I’m tempted to make it again in a totally different style.  I’m plotting…if I can get the list of other things to do down to a manageable size, can I try one of these versions? Which one would tempt you, or would you choose another colorway entirely?

Quilter’s Scrapbook in Blogger’s Quit Festival

It’s Blogger’s Quit Festival time again.  This time around I’ve decided to enter Quilter’s Scrapbook in the Scrappy category.  If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ve seen this one before.  I love it because it has a scrap of just about every project I made in my first 13 years of quilting.  I have to think a bit harder for some fabrics than others, but I can still identify which project most scraps came from.



When I started cutting down my scraps into strips, squares and rectangles a few years back, I cut 1 1/2” squares from the smallest scraps.  Once I had a pile of them, I felt ridiculous.  Seriously, when was I going to use those small bits?  I’m not a very scrappy quilter.  I work well with matchy-matchy, organised designs. and all those varied bits were all so…NOT matchy matchy!  Plus they were so small!

I held on to the box of little squares a little longer.  Just as I was about to throw them away, I saw a picture of a quilt made of 144-patch blocks.  All those little disparate bits in each block looked fantastic together and I started thinking that perhaps I could use my tiny squares after all.

In the end I made 100-patch blocks, making a conscious effort to not try to match fabrics as I sewed squares together. After the blocks were made I dressed things up a little with pieced sashing and a pieced border.  I waited until the blocks were done before choosing the sashing and border fabrics.  Once the blocks were made I had a better idea what colours would set them off well.



I quilted it very simply using my walking foot to quilt straight lines. What you see in the block above was Take 3.  I forget what else I tried, but I do remember picking out whatever my first two ideas for quilting the blocks were!  I knew exactly how I wanted to quilt the border, but it was tedious and I didn’t get a good rhythm going until I was onto the last side.  I think it was worth it though.

This is possibly my favourite quilt so far (well, at least until I put it away and pull out another favourite for a little while!)  It measures 59” x 73”, just perfect for curling up under on the couch.  It’s not quite big enough to drape over my queen bed, but it has been used on top of bigger quilts for an extra layer on colder nights.

I released the pattern for this quilt last January.  I have since updated the pattern to include instructions for strip piecing the blocks as well as those for piecing individual squares.  It is one of my most popular patterns, available here in my Etsy shop.



Hop on over to the festival to see all the other lovely quilts. You can nominate your favorite entry for Viewer’s Choice until October 31, then go back and vote for Viewer’s Choice and your favorite quilt in each category between November 1 and November 7.  Enjoy browsing the eye candy!

Taming scraps - again

Wait, didn’t I do this already?  I distinctly remember in January 2013 I attacked the scrap bin with the intention of cutting all those bits into useful sizes, à la Quiltville’s scrap user’s system.  By April I posted that the bin was empty!  I promptly used the bin for something else so I wouldn’t be tempted to let the untrimmed scraps pile up again.

I did pretty well for a while.  When I cut fabric for a project, I cut down the small leftovers right away.  I was very pleased with myself, yet somewhere along the way the scraps started reproducing.  All by themselves, I’m sure.  When I was tidying up my quilting corner last week, I found this:

I don’t remember tossing all those scraps in there.  Well, not that many, anyway.

So, I’ve been spending some time every day sorting and cutting these down.  At least this bin is smaller than the one I tackled last year! As you can see, I’m making progress: the piles of strings, strips, bricks and squares are growing and the level in the bin is going down.

Now I need to start a new project so I can put this bin to work storing the new project, hopefully depriving any new untrimmed scraps of breeding grounds.

I have a stash???

I recently was surprised to discover that I have a small but usable fabric stash.  Really, I was surprised.  I usually buy just what I need for whatever quilt I’m making and there is usually just a bit left over.  The bits started adding up, but for a long time I felt they were all just so different that there just weren’t enough pieces that went together to make anything. Was that collection really a stash?

Recently I realized I might have enough pieces, but those pieces were all small and were the last bits of some fabrics I really liked.  I didn’t want to use up the last bits because, well, they might be just the perfect piece for some project down the line.

Finally I had that little moment of clarity that whispered “What are you saving the fabric for?  Ummm…a quilt???”  So I dug through the bin of bright and novelty fabrics that I was saving and made a quilt.  Here’s the unquilted top of Baby Steps.



And you know what?  It hardly made a dent in the bins of fabric. My variety of yellows and lighter purples is a little lower than it was before.  I had a little moment of panic when I realized I was using up the last of that really cute purple dragonfly fabric but I survived and now it is in a quilt which is what I was saving it for anyway. There are still a few quilt tops’ worth of fun fabrics in those bins.  And you know there will be new additions to refresh the variety at some point.



Today is a gorgeous day (finally!) so I’m going outside to do yard work, but I believe there is rain in the forecast for the next couple of days so this quilts might get sandwiched and quilted by the middle of the week. 

Quilter’s Scrapbook!

It’s finished!  Now I am yet again pondering the question of how quilt magazines get all those lovely shots of quilts artfully draped on furniture.  It was a little mucky to go outside for pictures so I tried the artful drape approach.

 

I’m not quite managing that magazine look!  It looks very tidy on the sofa. No, I didn’t intentionally match the pillows. Those were already on the sofa, but they do complement the quilt nicely.

I quilted this with, of course, my walking foot. The borders and sashing are all quilted in the ditch.  The perimeter of the 100-patches are quilted in the ditch and again 1/4” outside the block. Here’s what I ended up with in the block, after playing with then taking a seam ripper to nesting squares on point and diagonals all in one direction:

I didn’t get a good picture of the quilting across the whole quilt.  If you could see the whole top you would see that tipping this quilting design on its side every other block added a bit of movement to the quit top, drawing the eye from one block to the next.

Despite grand thoughts of trying some quilting in the white parts of the sashing to make it look like the red and yellow strips were floating on top of the quilting, I decided that would make the quilting in these spaces much too dense compared to other parts of the quilt and I’d get a puckered, wavy quilt.  I didn’t want to quilt too densely in the 100-patches because I wanted the scraps to be the focus.

I have already posted a peek of the border quilting, but here it is again.

By the time I started quilting the last side of the border I had figured out how to quilt it most efficiently so that side was completed fairly quickly.  Those first three were not fun though!

I am writing a pattern for Quilter’s Scrapbook and am looking for a few kind souls who might like to test it in exchange for the pattern.  If you are interested please email me.  Now I am off to wrestle with block diagrams…

Sashing

Adding white frames to all the 100-patch blocks, paper piecing 20 cornerstones and assembling 31 striped sashing units kept me busy the last couple of days.

Today I finally saw it all come together.  It looks better in person.  In the photo the red sashing overpowers the yellow sashing and seems to bulge out.  In person the two are better balanced.  I guess it’s a scale issue.

Maybe a closer view would show the balance more.

I still need to add borders.  There will be a 1” white border all around to float the center, followed by a medium width red border, then a pieced red and white border (like the sashing, but all white on a red background and a little wider) then a thin red border to finish it all off.  The quilt will measure about 59” x 73”.

Tonight will be either paper piecing X units or striped units for the pieced border, depending on how tired I am.  Right now I could go either way.  I’m excited to see this come together though so I might make a push to get more than less done.

Ready to sew

I really felt like sewing this week but since the machine was in the shop for maintenance my family put up with grumpy mom instead (sorry about that, family!)  Yesterday I was seized with the urge to cut up fabric.

Today the quilt shop called, a whole week earlier than I expected, to say my sewing machine was ready to come home.  Must be fate!

What you see above is going to turn into pieced sashing and a pieced border for these:

Guess what I’m going to be doing tonight?

Totally scrappy

Last week’s challenge to myself was to sew together 1200 little 1.5” scrap squares together without obsessing about colour placement.  It was hard work (you know I’m a matchy-matchy quilter) but I’m almost done.  They have been wrestled down into 120 strips of 10 patches without my giving in to the urge to lay 1200 squares out on the design wall first.  Seriously, I think the totally impracticality of that option is the only thing that held me back.

Without further ado, here’s the first block of 100 patches:

There are 11 more to go.  The plan is to frame them in a neutral colour and put them all together with some sort of pieced sashing, maybe a garden maze sashing.  I haven’t decided yet what colours I will work with for the sashing.  I’m waiting to finish the blocks and see if there are one or two colours that would tie them all together.

When all the blocks are done I think there will be at least one piece of fabric from every quilt I have made since I started my first quilt in 2000, plus a few bits from non-quilt projects.  The challenge will then be to remember which project each fabric represents!

Now for something completely different

Well, different for me, anyway. As my hand, full of tiny fabric scraps, hovered over the waste basket I thought “Why not sew them all together willy-nilly and see what happens?”  So I did.
I didn’t plan, measure, or square anything up as I went.  I didn’t even use my iron!  This was really out of character for me but it came out kind of cute so of course I pushed on a little further.


Voila!  Wooffles’ new play quilt (well, the top at least – it still needs quilting).  You see him in the picture on the right for scale.
That row of vertical stripes was supposed to be much less regular than it ended up.  Considering all the effort I have to put in to avoid wonky crooked blocks, you’d think that going wonky would require less work.  Not so.  Getting a crooked result on purpose was actually quite challenging!  It didn’t even get as crooked as I wanted.
The bottom section was inspired by CW quilts’ Jelly roll 1600 quilts.  I just sewed all my leftover bits of 1 1/2” bright strips together end to end, folded the resulting strip in half tip to tip and sewed along the long edge.  I cut the fold and opened up a new wider but shorter strip, which I then folded and sewed and cut again.  This was really the only way for me to sew all these bits together randomly, because otherwise I would have thought through every placement and it really wouldn’t have been random at all.  Am I making any sense?
Also, I want to point out that the little purple triangle in the white border was – ahem – totally intentional.  It had nothing whatsoever to do with sewing on a border strip a little bit over from where it needed to be and needing to fill the gap.  At no time was I – ahem- tempted to pull out a seam ripper to reposition said strip.  It is supposed to be totally improvisational after all!
This was a fun little side trip for me, but I’m going to head back into my comfort zone of carefully planned quilts for a little bit.  Here’s where the flying geese quilt stands, waiting for one last seam and then some sort of borders. (No prizes for guessing where the scraps for Wooffles’ quilt came from!)

I had thought of doing pieced borders with all the various colours, but now I think that would be overpowering.  Maybe two adjacent blue sides and two adjacent purples?  Or maybe not. Perhaps I need to bring the top in to the quilt shop and see if any appropriate fabric finds me.