behind the scenes with 2 quilting teachers – plans, projects, progress & procrastination
It’s the final Scrappy Sunday post of 2020 – and (we have decided) our final Scrappy Sunday post. Something new will be appearing in the New Year – but possibly not on Sundays!
And as its that time of year, and today was supposed to be about strips, here’s a Log Cabin festive quilt.
No, its not scrappy but yours could be.
So – we hope you have a happy Christmas (as best as we all can in the circumstances). Stay safe and let us hope for a better 2021.
We’re almost at the end of our Scrappy Sundays for this year so we decided to trawl back through the C&B Archives looking for scrappiness that we might have missed –
We do love scraps!
Our December block is the deceptively simple Hourglass. Over on the Doodles page you can see some ideas in greyscale but over here we’re all about scraps – which can change the look of the quilts quite dramatically.
First – here’s the block as conventionally coloured and then using scraps with a different colour placement
What happens when we use scraps to make a quilt? First – rainbow colours on a white ground using the same colour placement as the first block above
These next three quilts use the colour placement of the second block
But, as it is now December, what does the quilt look like in the traditional red, green and white and using our Christmas scraps? This might give you an idea
You can download a quilt to colour here.
More scrappy stuff over at the Overseas Office. Barbara is making more samples for online classes and digging deep into the once-carefully-sorted scrap bags. Who knows where this may lead?
Is it too soon to mention December 25th? Chris has been rummaging in the cupboards of C&B Towers and come across a set of table mats made some (oh dear – just done the sums!) 30 years ago for parents’ Ruby Wedding and for Christmas that year – parents got married at Christmas (foolish time of year according to mother many years later).
Enough rambling – today’s theme for Scrappy Sundays is Stars and quite fortuitously several of those mats feature star blocks. There’s loads of star patterns out there and what better for using up scraps than a few star blocks? And if you can use up scrap Christmas fabrics and decorate your table too?!
These were just simple 12 inch blocks quilted in the ditch and bound. They’ve been washed every year too – and still they have gravy stains.
But you could make a slightly more sophisticated style – border a block on two sides for instance and add a bit of fancy quilting before binding.
So why not give it a go? There’s plenty of time – for next year!
And it’s back to squares again for Barbara in her pursuit of all things scrappy. The JellyRoll strips which showed up unexpectedly a couple of posts ago turned out to be the trigger for a new scrappy handpiecing project. Strips have been turned into squares and squares have been added to a couple of mini Charm packs and everything thoroughly mixed up in a large bag. Simple 4patch blocks have been set out on a worktable and we await further developments – maybe more squares will be cut and added to the bag, maybe piecing will commence. No deadline has been set even though some of the fabrics show snowflakes and holly leaves – it will just be stitching without overthinking, perfect for this time of year when we all need to take just a little bit of time for ourselves.
Happy stitching!
November already and time for a new EQ Doodle post. Our block this month is based on an eight-pointed star and is called Checked X. Have a look on the Doodles page for lots of ideas for using this block in a quilt.
Over here on Scrappy Sunday we need to look at the quilt made with scraps – and in fact it does seem to work. This is just a straightforward 4 x 4 block setting. If you want to colour a quilt, or design your own then you can download a quilt to colour here; and if you want to make a block, or even a quilt, you can download the templates to make a 12 inch block here.
Does a part Jelly Roll count as scraps? We’re not entirely sure but we think, in these weird times, that maybe it does. After all it’s just 2 1/2inch strips, not yardage or fat quarters …. So, if we can agree on that, Barbara is delighted to report that her scrap stash at the Overseas Office just expanded! Tucked away in a project bag for a Dresden Plate class and now transferred and ready for use –
There’s one Begun scrappy project which will be a perfect fit for these –
or maybe they’ll come in handy for this Begun scrappy project –
Or maybe just wade in and start a completely new scrappy project? We’ll let you know what happens!
Squares are one thing that seem to accumulate in the scrap bag, or else packs of charm squares are purchased for some reason which is then forgotten. But we have a cunning plan for those squares.
First you need a collection of squares that are the same size – 3 inches or slightly larger seems to be about right, but perhaps no bigger than 8 (when they cease to be ‘scraps’ anyway are become ‘useful’!). Add to those a selection of background scraps – background means a fabric (or fabrics) that contrast well with the main fabrics, so usually dark or very light.
Place a background scrap across a corner of a square, right sides together, and stitch – the background should cover the corner of the square when folded back. Repeat for all four corners and you should end up with something that looks like this
Make lots of these, changing the angles of the backgrounds as you go, and then join them together into a quilt. You will get four-pointed star shapes appearing where the blocks meet.
Play with the colours – you may prefer to use squares of background with coloured scraps in the corners which will give you lots of blank space for quilting. . . ?
Another Sunday and a little more scrappiness from the Overseas Office. Limited progress on these dinky hexagon stars –
but lots of scraps available to make more progress.
Looking for something else entirely in archive files we came across this photo –
this was one of the very first quilts Barbara made. Before we understood about quilting! Measurements and templates made more by guesstimate than precision and mathematics, machine pieced with enthusiasm but absolutely no skill or consistency, backed with cheap curtain lining, top composed entirely of furnishing fabric (heavy cotton) offcuts and scraps. It’s a wonder that any seams met – and if you look closely, most of them don’t!
But it’s still holding together after all these years – a great testament to scraps and enthusiasm.
chris & barbara quilts 