Something Just for Me

One of the universal problems that anyone working with fabric faces is what to do with scraps?  Sewists, quilters, we all have little pieces of fabric taking up room and mocking us.  They’re still useful, can’t throw them out, what to do?  I suppose knitters have the same problem with yarn.  After Christmas and all of those projects for others I took a little time to make something just for me, only using scraps.  (And then after this project I took some time and reorganized my crafting space.  So claustrophobic!)

I started this project with the blues.  I mean, a lot of blues.  I’ve been looking for a while for a good foundation pieced block pattern to use up scraps like this.  I like foundation piecing, especially for weird little shapes, as it helps stabilize what may otherwise stretch out of place.  I came across this blog in my search:  Pintangle’s Crazy Quilt

I’m not into crazy quilting, but these blocks were perfect for what I wanted to do.  I chose to only work with block one and rotate it throughout the quilt.  I was also inspired in my design by this quilt, which I pinned in Pinterest a while back: Bottled Rainbows

Here you can see how I modified the block by adding a 1/4 inch sash between each piece.  Below are close ups so you can see that even the white fabrics were scraps of all kinds.

The blocks started coming together, and that’s when I realized my big mistake.  When printing the blocks I had copied and pasted the pattern into Word in order to fit more than one onto a page, and inadvertently stretched the block by about a 1/4 inch on one side.  Not a big deal, except I was flipping the blocks as I was sewing them into rows.  You can see in the picture above that it was creating a problem.  I did end up unsewing quite a lot of it and did some trimming.  It got better, but I’ll always see where it’s wrong.

Next is the border.  Still working with scraps, still foundation piecing.  I cut longer strips of plain white fabric and pieced directly onto that.

Every so often I stopped, flipped it over, and trimmed.  Yes, I’m making more scraps.  It’s a never-ending loop!

I kept the quilting simple, as I always do, by stitching in the ditch with variegated thread.  Quilting is my least favorite part of the process, so I keep it simple.

And here it is, hanging in my room.  It reads a little warmer in this light.  It’s actually the first quilt I’ve finished in a while, and it was a nice mental re-set to move on to the next thing, which was to reorganize my sewing space.