Monday, February 17, 2014

New scrap quilt thanks to Pinterest



I've started a new scrap quilt thanks to Pinterest.  It's creator, Deanna of the Wedding Dress Blue blog, named it the "Film at Five" quilt and it is an extremely serviceable design for all sorts of scrap arrangements.  I started looking for a likely candidate design when my scrap box had to be declared totally out of control.

Once I had the design, I dumped the scrap box and began cutting two-and-a-half inch squares.
Having a two-and-a-half inch ruler is a huge help so you can quickly see if you can use the scrap in question.
Slipping is always a problem, but a saw a great idea in the new American Patchwork and Quilting magazine about using shelf liner to help hold a larger ruler still.  It works like a charm.
The blocks in this quilt are twenty-five squares, and the illustrated quilts on Deanna's website were mostly charm style (all blocks different).  I actually had large quantities of several fabrics, so I did some improvising.  The first block I did used an overall floral and difference pink fabrics.
The next one used two different fabrics only.
Putting them together using string piecing went very fast.  You can see the threads connecting the rows.
This block used crayon fabric and then solids in the crayon colors.
Calling the vertical rows one through five, turn row two over onto row one

and then starting at the top, pick up the five pairs (starting at the top and putting the next pair on the bottom) and take them to the sewing machine.

Sew the five pairs together without breaking the thread in between pairs.
Pick up row three as you picked up the first row.
Starting at the top, open the pairs and sew row three to the pairs, again without breaking the thread between the now-forming rows.
Once you've picked up all twenty-five squares, press in one direction for the top row and the opposite direction for the next row and so on.  Pressing is really important as it makes you work more accurate and looks better.

Press the finished block from the right side.

Most of the time, I just cut blocks, but for several of them, I did do "fussy cutting."

Here's the finished Clifford block.
I also "fussy cut" the Cat in the Hat fabric.
This is the dinosaur fabric.
As you can see, the blocks are largely children's fabric.  This one is the exception, but I think it works with the others.
I love all the kitten's green eyes staring out from this block.
For the borders, I decided to use one fabric for the corners. The white fabric is a white on white print of numbers in different fonts.
The rest of the border blocks use solid fabrics.

I'm very pleased with the nine-block size (54 square inches) and I've got other ideas for new color combinations.  I'm an old-fashioned quilter in many ways and using up my scraps is certainly one of them.