Still Blog Hopping...And Now For Scrap Strategy # 2

It's Still Blog Give-away Time! Yeah!

I am participating in the Quilt Gallery-Blog Hop Party w/ Give-Away. (link to the right)   But what to give-away?  I’ve been collecting fabric seriously for more than 20 years.  So here’s my give away.  TEN - Fat Quarter’s (that’s a $25-$30.00 value) selected from my stash tailored to the request of the winner!   I’ve pretty much got it all; batiks, repro’s from the 1930’s and 1800’s, all colors, kids fabrics, bugs, food, flowers, oriental, flannels, plaids, etc...  The winner can request a smorgasborg or all of one kind.  Fun for you to make a wish list, fun for me to tailor a collection just for you.

What do you need to do?  Leave me a comment at the end of this blog ( please, just one comment per visitor) and a way I can contact you if you are the lucky winner.  I will even cover over seas shipping!  I will draw a name at the end of the blog- hop at midnight,  Pacific time and announce the winner by Weds. Sept. 5th.

And Now for Scrap Strategy #2- start sewing

Just to re-cap:  Check out my blog from 8-3-12.  Scrap Strategy #1 is to sort your scraps.  You don't have to.  You could just put all colors and styles of fabric in one basket but I think sorting according to fabric style is particularly useful and makes design sense.  My tastes in fabric run all over the map if I were to mix all my scraps together I think I would end up with an incoherent hodge podge.  Perhaps your scraps have more focus and you can skip that step.

 Any who, the next thing is to seperate your chosen scraps into two piles, strips and other.  for me the 'other' is predominately square and rectangular patches with a few triangles mixed in.  I don't bother to true anything up I just take 'um as they come.  Put your strips on one side of your sewing machine and your patches on the other.  Pick out a strip that makes you smile and put it under you presser foot face up then take a patch from your patch side and lay it right side down on the end of the strip.  Sew your standard 1/4" seam.  Pick up the next appealing patch and lay it a short ways after the first patch.  keep going until you run out of that strip.  Repeat this several times 'til you have a pile of chained components.

 One unit Looks kinda like this, ready for the iron.

It's easy to iron toward the strip, you just flip the strip up and run your iron down the seam and since we're not really too worried about accuracy here just snip between the patches with scissors, saves a lot of time!

These are from a red scrap project, here's what it looks like with kid fabric:

From here you can flip them around and sew them to each other...this

To this...instant checkerboard, well sort of.

Or like any of these combos.

You can take these units and sew them to each other or more strips etc.  Until you have a nice collection of scrappy units to play with like this:

Sometimes you find two strips that go well together, so go with it...

Then you need to decide how big you want you blocks to be and start combining units that give you approximately that size.

Close to the center you can see part of the finished block below (rotated 180).

Here's another finished block. Can you find the subunits in the picture above?

Here's the finished quilt.

I think framing each block with its own frame helps calm every thing down.  I think that works well with sampler quilts to.  

I use this basic technique with all styles of fabric.  Grandma's quilt in the last blog started this way.  You can see there are a lot of leftovers but that's OK 'cause it's all kind of an ongoing process.  Some of those units will go into the next kid quilt I make.

A note about this technique;  I got the seeds for the idea for this strategy from an article in the back of an old Quilter's Newsletter mag.  It was probably 10 or 12 years ago.  I would give you the exact reference but I can't find it.  If you stumble across it please let me know. 

I hope you are all having fun with the blog hop.  I sure am!  Special thanks to all who have signed onto follow my blog.  I am very grateful and energized by your kindness and interest! Cheers, Claire W. 

Blog Hop and Going Primitive...

Give-away! Yeah!

I am participating in the Quilt Gallery-Blog Hop Party w/ Give-Away. (link to the right)   But what to give-away?  I’ve been collecting fabric seriously for more than 20 years.  So here’s my give away.  TEN - Fat Quarter’s (that’s a $25-$30.00 value) selected from my stash tailored to the request of the winner!   I’ve pretty much got it all; batiks, repro’s from the 1930’s and 1800’s, all colors, kids fabrics, bugs, food, flowers, oriental, flannels, plaids, etc...  The winner can request a smorgasborg or all of one kind.  Fun for you to make a wish list, fun for me to tailor a collection just for you.

What do you need to do?  Leave me a comment at the end of this blog ( please, just one comment per visitor) and a way I can contact you if you are the lucky winner.  I will even cover over seas shipping!  I will draw a name at the end of the blog- hop at midnight,  Pacific time and announce the winner by Weds. 

and here's my latest blog...

Did I mention going Primitive?

Traveling with your sewing / quilting supplies is a tricky business especially when traveling with your husband and not on a quilt-road-trip.  I brought my featherweight and a bag of flannel scrapes but I managed to leave my cutting board, rotary cutter and iron at my last stop.  My supplies are safe, our last stop was my mother-in-laws house. I like my mother-in-law well enough but I'm not ready to drive back there to get my supplies.  So I'm going primitive (so to speak).  Cut with scissors and finger press.

 Fortunately, I just brought a bag of scraps so a lot of the cutting was already done.  I use a lot of flannel for backings so I generate a lot of extra  flannel strip.  I figured there were enough scraps for a lap quilt.  I started to arrange them in rows and cut them off at around 36".  One of my new favorite scrap eaters!

When I got to about 45" in length I slapped on the ends. The triangles came out of the scrap bag and I just added the red to make them wide enough to fit. All I needed was some borders.  But not enough scraps!  I succumbed to temptation and went to the nearest purveyor of fabric.  Walmart!  Surprisingly I found some decent flannel, and only $6.00 / yard!

The top really needed a press before I could sew borders on.  That was when it dawned on me that I might be able to borrow an iron and board from the office where we are staying! duh!  Now, how to cut them borders?  I procured a tape measure and a pair of scissors from the local 99 cent store and away we go! I call it the point and shoot method, or in this case, point and cut!

It looks a bit like a giant spool of multi colored thread!  I think I might hand quilt it with big primitive stitches.  These scraps are actually the leftovers of leftover.  So that makes this the granddaughter.

Here's grandma:

Grandma's backside: (that sounds funny?!) I bought that check fabric for some PJ's for my older son when he was a toddler.  He's 26 now.  He was such a busy toddler I never got around to making those PJ's!

Here's daughter:

I know what your thinking...they all look kind of primitive.  I guess that's just the way I roll.
cheers, Claire W.

PS - If you enjoyed todays blog I hope you will consider signing on to follow my blog.  My primary goal is to learn by sharing and visa versa.

PSS- A word about comments:

I like comments that are specific.  ‘Love that quilt’ feels good for the appreciation factor. Making a comment like ‘the purple and green fabrics work well together’ contains more useful information.

Thanks to Randy for the Retail Therapy!

Since I could not make it to the Sister's show this year I gave my good friend Randy some money to purchase some vintage quilts at our favorite antique quilt vendor.  I think of it as long distance 'retail therapy'!  Last week Randy and I got together and she brought me my quilts!   They are both just wonderful!  Great designs (kinda different),  great colors, really nicely quilted and good prices!  I could not be happier if I had purchase these quilts myself!

This is really a different kind of appliqued flower with scrappy background fabrics.

And the combo of the green, white and yellow surrounding the flowers gives this Grandma's flower garden a really cheerful and different look.

Look at the little girls playing with hoops.  What a great print and applique!

What great 30's prints and you can really see how the yellow/ white/ green makes a great combo!

See the wonderful quilting; really fine stitching and really close rows.

 
And an added bonus was how great the Grandma's flower garden looked on my daughter's bed against the sage paint!  Naomi has very particular tastes.  She's into 'high style' not vintage, but she recently moved to the big city so what she can't see won't hurt her modern sensibilities!

 Randy said it was a real group effort with her all of her friends there, so thanks to everyone who consulted with Randy!  I love my new vintage quilts!  And a special thanks to Randy for taking on the challenge!  cheers, Claire W.

Scrap Strategy #1 - Sorting Scraps

Nothing spells retail therapy for me like a brand new bag of scraps!  Call me crazy but I actually buy scraps by-the-pound off the inter net.  I like the diversity!  And there is nothing more fun than sorting a new bag of scraps.  It’s like Christmas morning for grown-ups! 

Once the scrap bag is opened and decompresses you can see the bounty.  All sorts of fabric treasures await my discovery!

 Generally I dump the scraps on the floor and start by smoothing the strips and patches out and placing them into piles according to style and/ or color.  This particular scrap bag had an abundance of batiks.  Nice generous strips ranging from 1” to about 5” wide.  

Then I get out my fabric baskets and put the scraps in their new homes.   This bag went into the following categories.

 

1^st row                               miscellaneous               large batik strips                 solids

2^nd row   batik patches        kid fabric’s          holiday fabric       oriental      Geometrics

These are by no means all of my scrap basket categories but when I want to put my finger on something specific I usually only have to thumb through a couple of baskets to find it. 

This is just the beginning of a scrap adventure full of fun and lots of sewing.  Yeah! 

Cheers, Claire W.

Amish Leftovers-part two

This is the quilt that generated most of the leftover units for my previous blog.

I called it "Geisha Surrounded".  I know, I couldn't help myself. You can just see the geisha with her fan peeking from the edge of the  circle. 

 I won the border blocks in a block of the month drawing at my guild. Of course a certain amount of variation is expected in any block swap but since these Bergoine Surrounded blocks had sooo many seams the discrepancy was somewhat amplified.  The blocks were suppose to be 14" finished but they measured from about 13 1/4" to about 15 1/4".  Also some people did not make them a 'variety' of Amish colors, so I tabled a couple of them.

But I thought rather than set the blocks in a regular grid where the measurement differences would be really obvious I would use them to make a border.   I designed the center to accommodate the border.  You can still see where the corners of the blocks meet how much had to be trimmed off to make them all the same size.

The next time you find yourself with some 'dimension' challenged BOMs you might try this approach.  It's fun and relatively easy. Cheers, Claire W.