Happy September everyone! I think this is my favorite month out of the whole year.
I love the cooler temperatures and watching the trees start to change.
Plus, soon it will be quilt weather again...gotta love that!
As I near the finish of each scrap quilt, I am on the look out for inspiration for the next one. In an older post on
how I store my scraps, I shared I keep a seperate bin under my cutting table just for leftover 2 1/2" strips. As I was dropping some leftover binding pieces in there, I noticed the bin is starting to over flow. An overflowing bin is always a sign to plan a scrap quilt.
There is one pattern I love to make with my leftover bindings and it is a 16 patch.
Last October, I shared a post showing some of these scrap quilts in process. I thought this month I would share in more detail how I put these together as part of the
Scrap-A-Palooza series.
So my vision for this month's scrap quilt is to make simple 16 patch blocks from leftover
2 1/2" strips and group them into a quilt.
Here are some examples of what I have made in the past. These make great utilitarian or donation quilts. In fact, I plan on donating this one as part of the 100 Quilts for Kids event going on until the end of September. Want to join me?
To get started, I quickly viewed what I had in the bin and determined I had quite a few strips in the green and blue colorways. So I think I will just pick out these colors to work with. Next, I had to sort out the ones that were longer than 20" as this is the length we need. Anything that was longer, I roughly trimmed to about 21".
I then started to pair them up - one print and one solid in each pairing. Each of these will make one block. You can see I already have about 20 blocks ready to sew up.
These blocks will finish out at 8". I would like this quilt to be about 50 x 60 so I will need to collect up enough strips to make about 48 blocks total. I may have to cut up some larger scraps and unloved yardage to get enough for this quilt but I know I have lots of fabric in these colorways so that should not be an issue!
So to prepare for next week:
- Pull your scraps/stash and determine what fabrics to use.
- Rough cut your strips to length and if you have time, pair them up
Note: This pattern can also be made with wider strips if you have some on hand. I hope to share a quilt soon that I am making with 3 1/2" strips. Unfortunately, I ran out of solid black so I need to get some on order before I can proceed.
Drop me a line if you are joining in so I can follow along on your
progress. I love to feature the projects of others - it is so fun to
see what everyone comes up with. Feel free to grab the button in the
sidebar
to share with your readers what you are up to.
And if you have any
questions, don't hesitate to contact me.
Now let's Deal with Those Scraps!
