Sunday, November 21, 2010

My Scraps Have Been Mating

I had this great idea for a blue quilt and when I pulled out the scrap bin, I discovered that my white scraps have been mating.  I seem to have pulled 2 gallons worth of white bits out of that 1 gallon bag.  I knew there were a lot of scraps leftover from the Joseph's Coat, but had conveniently forgotten how many.

I committed this weekend to getting rid of them once and for all.  I ironed them all flat again and discovered that they were in 3 basic shapes.

I started stitching them together to make strips, which when trimmed up were 1, 1.25, or 2 inches wide.

I finally figured out a  process for joining sections of crazy strips.  I lined up the bottom edge, overlapping the edges. Pick a random angle for the seam...something that wastes the least amount of fabric.

Throw away the little nubs,


and sew the seam without any worries about the actual angle of the seam.


I also made a bunch of wider strips.  These ended up being 4.5" wide.  Once they were about this size, I found it worked best to lay them out and look for similar angles...adding bits when needed to square up the shape.


Since I decided that these were going to become a quilted pillow case to go with the JC quilt, I made the strips 30" long.

On one side of the pillow case, I alternated the 1 and 2 inch crazy strips with 1.5" strips of white-on-white from the stash.

The other side has the 4" strip, some wider pieces of white-on-white and the remaining crazy strips.

I made 2 of these for a matching pair.

The next step will be to quilt them, which I plan to make like a couple of mini-quilts (30" x 40") before trimming them up, adding an opening band, etc.

To make sure that I used up every drop of the white, and to test my quilting idea, I made this doll quilt.
I used the 2 teal Aurifil threads, alternating rows between the darker and lighter.  I was trying to decide if I liked these wino lines slightly buzzed, or really trashed.  I like them with more wiggles.  Guess I'll have to go buy a bottle of wine and see if that improves my technique.

Will have time to finish these up later in the week.

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