With the return of the rain here in the Pacific Northwest, I have found myself back indoors and working away in my sewing room. That means I have made a bit more progress on my scrap quilt.
If you remember, I am making this Scrap-A-Palooza quilt to try and tame my blue scraps a bit. In my last post, I shared some of the squares I cut for a simple patchwork quilt.
Now with everything cut, it is time to get it up on the design wall so I can start the sewing!
Whenever I am working with scraps, a trick I use to get the fabrics and colors dispersed evenly through the quilt is to split up my scraps. As this is a fairly small quilt, I decided to just make two piles (the top and bottom halves of the quilt). If it were a bigger bed quilt, I might choose four piles (one for each quadrant of the quilt).
To make these piles even, I just "deal" one of each fabric in two piles. If I have more than two squares of a fabric, I just continue to sort them. (Note: I am never this organized. I just did this to make a nice picture.)
All of the odd squares I throw into another pile to sort at the end.
To sort the odd numbered pile, I just try and pair up squares that are the same colors or have a similar look.
These get added to the piles along with the lighter fabrics using the same method. Now we are ready to start putting them up on the design wall.
Using one of these stacks, I put the squares up for the top half of the quilt. Remember, I am also adding some larger squares, a few light squares and some half square triangles to this quilt for interest. I used the HSTs to create some fun diamonds floating among the blue patchwork.
Then using the second stack of blocks, I laid out the bottom half of the quilt. I find when I divide up my fabrics at the start, I don't need to spend a lot of time moving around my layouts to disperse the prints and colors better. I can get to the sewing a whole lot faster!
As you can see, I have started to sew the rows together. I will be pulling off each row and using it as a leaders and enders project as I work on other projects.
Before I know it, I will have a quilt top to share with you!
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6 comments:
That's a great tip about splitting up your scraps Cyndy! I always feel like I'd like to control the "scrappy" at least a little bit. LOL
This looks like the start of a wonderful quilt!
I love your tip for spreading out the colours. I really like how all the blues are looking!
You know how much I love blue, but I love even more that tip about sorting the fabrics ahead of time!! How many hours I have spent rearranging, walking away, thinking, looking, walking away, rearranging, asking others' opinions (make that dragging them into my sewing room) when they say they don't know quilts...Come on, how long have you been married to me??! Oops I gave the person's identity away methinks...
Thanks for the sorting tip. I sometimes spend way too much time moving things on the design wall.
I do the exact same thing with my scrappy quilts. It makes everything go so much better along the way. I find it interesting as well to find out which fabrics are the "attention hogs" in the quilt because often it's not the ones I was expecting! I really like this layout - I seem to be drawn to offset designs right now.
I love this! The HSTs add so much!
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