Playing with Other People's Scraps

 What's more fun than playing with your scraps? That's easy- playing with other people's scraps!

All of us have our own quilting journey. I have always loved quilts, especially scrappy ones. As a child when visiting relatives who had quilts, my favorite game to play was finding the fabric I thought was ugliest. I always thought the quilts were beautiful, but not all of the fabrics were. I always thought including ugly fabrics in a quilt made it better. 

My mother was mainly a garment sewer. She is incredibly talented, much better at garment sewing than I'll ever be. She used to let me play in her scraps to "make" clothes for my dolls. Of course, I couldn't sew and had no interest in learning, so my dolls mainly wore ponchos with a string tied around the waist.

I didn't start sewing until I was pregnant with DS the Elder. I sewed my maternity clothes, I sewed clothes for my kids, and I started my own scrap collection. I longed to make quilts, but the babies kept coming, and having five kids age 6 and younger does not allow for much hobby time. If I wanted to sew, I kept it practical and made their clothes or curtains, or whatever we needed at the time. 

The children grew as children do, and eventually they didn't need to watched every second. I bought a quilting book and read it several times through. The book was Quilting for People Who Don't Have Time to Quilt by Marti Michell. I still didn't really have time to quilt, I was homeschooling and involved in church, but I kept dreaming about quilting. Eventually, I did start quilting, a wallhanging here, quilts for the kids beds, because we didn't have enough blankets. 

I have never taken a quilt class. I started quilting by using what I had, however I could make it work. I followed no quilt police rules, because I didn't know the rules. I've learned that not knowing the rules is a very freeing thing. 

I LOVE reading quilting blogs, watching other people's quilting journeys. I LOVE watching quilters on YouTube for the same reason. I've seen quilters who are so paralyzed by the color theory class they took, they don't trust themselves to choose fabrics, and I've seen quilters who took a similar class and then created award winning quilts. The same class that can inspire one person, can discourage another. I'm glad I didn't know color theory when I started, and I'm also glad I've taken the time to learn about it now. 

I've noticed some quilters only feel comfortable playing with certain colors or color families. No matter which line of fabric Lori Holt or Sugaridoo has out, they all match their other lines. Karen Brown from Just Get It Done Quilts likes to stick with the same colors, even though she doesn't design fabric, she likes using a narrow selection of colors. In some ways, I envy them. If you stick to a color palette, all your scraps will play nicely together, every single time. I've run over it in my mind, could I stick to one aesthetic? No, I couldn't. I want to play with all of it! I want the brights and the neutrals, the modern fabrics and the reproduction fabrics, give me solids, tonals, and prints. Novelty fabrics I use a lot. 

My preference to use a bit of everything is why I LOVE playing with other people's scraps. I've used fabrics I would never, ever have purchased, and it was so much fun! If I don't like a fabric, I only look at it as a color, and ignore any print it may have. If I find a scrap I love, but I don't have much of it, I'll pull the colors from it to make a project, kind of give a quilt the feel of the fabric I liked. 

I'm still assembling quilts, largely from other people's scraps.

One woman gave me a bunch of plaids. I love plaids! She makes a lot of western style shirts, and a lot of the plaids leaned into feminine colors. I use men's shirts a lot in quilting, but feminine plaids? This was new. Another woman gave me a bunch of solids. A lot of the solids were colors that would work with the plaids. The solids were odd shapes and sizes from garment sewing. I decided to cut all the plaids into 5" squares, then cut the solids into 1" strips. I ended up needing more plaids, so I dug through my men's shirt stash and found some plaids that would work with the scraps I had, to make the quilt a bit larger. This quilt top is now assembled, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. I find the solid diamonds a fun modern twist on what overall has an old fashioned feel. 

I was given quite a bit of the stripe in this quilt. It again, was leftover from garment making, so the scraps were weird sizes and shapes. I chose strips from my Scrap User System that matched the striped fabric and made blocks. I originally planned to use sashing and cornerstones, and put on a border. I had even chosen the fabrics to do that, and they were piled up with the blocks. I had chosen a green for the sashing, but when I went to cut it to make the sashing, I decided I didn't like it. I tried several blues, no. Pink? Nope. White? It just washed everything out. I started playing with the scrappy blocks on the design wall, realized I could do the blocks by color in diagonal lines, and decided I'd go with that. I was still thinking of a border, until I got it together, and decided a border would be too much. I used all the striped fabric in the blocks, so that wasn't an option. The quilt doesn't look how I intended it to, but I'm OK with that. 

I'm currently working on blocks from jelly roll strips I was given. Most of the jelly roll strips are partial jelly rolls, some strips were used for a project, and I have what wasn't used. I'm picking through my Scrap User System to round out the number of strips I need for the projects I've decided to make. I'm trying several new to me patterns. The things about scraps is they aren't precious, you can relax and play a bit. Try something new, mix colors you normally wouldn't. Try a color scheme you saw somewhere, but didn't dare by fabrics for, not wanting to invest that kind of money in something you weren't sure about. Using scraps is a great way to get outside your comfort zone in a low risk way. What's the worst that can happen? You'll learn that you don't like something, which is useful information. You can always use the blocks you don't like as part of the backing on another quilt. Quilting with scraps is my playtime, the most fun I have quilting. Maybe you'd enjoy playing with scraps too!

Finish #5

I'm definitely not setting any personal records this year, but with how busy I am, I will celebrate every single finish I get! 

I finished another scooter quilt. This was was originally going to be raffled off in Chicago later this year, but that rally already has three separate raffles going on. We may hang it on our vendor booth as an attention getter, but it won't be getting raffled off there. At this point the fate of this quilt is yet to be determined. That's OK, at least it's finished. This quilt uses more different scooter fabrics than any other quilt I've made. It's got scooter fabrics from Italy, Great Britain, and Japan. It's got scooter fabrics I bought from Spoonflower at a premium $$$. I probably google scooter fabric once a week. For a very short period of time, they were easy to find. Right now, I don't know of any current fabric lines that have scooters. Spoonflower is about the only way I've been able to add to my scooter fabric stash lately. International sellers on ebay and Etsy are also an option. 

DH decided to host a rally this year as well, though it will be a road rally and not a big local affair. I don't have to make rally bags and such for it, and I won't be cooking for it either. In fact, I won't even be attending! When he started talking about it, I told him I'd rather stay home and sew, since he won't really need me to be there. His rally will be late October, so maybe I can get some of the king sized quilts assembled by then if it cools off, then I could set up the big basting tables in the living room and have a basting spree while he's gone. That would be a fantastic use of a few days alone!

Topping Up the Quilt Tops

I prefer assembling quilt tops in the winter, when all the extra fabric on my lap or thrown over my shoulder is a welcome warmth, rather than a stifling heat. That said, assembling quilt tops is exactly what I've been I've been doing. I've got several king sized quilts to assemble, and I'm going to let those wait for cooler weather, but the throw sized quilts, yeah, let's get those done. 

Even DH has noticed that every time he comes to the sewing room lately, there's a different quilt on the design wall. I'm noticing the piles of blocks hanging around my space going down, which is a very good thing! It's definitely cleaning up the slow way, but actually making progress! 

This is not one large quilt, each design board holds a separate kid quilt. both of these are assembled, and I had enough blocks left to make a third and it's assembled as well. I made these blocks, and other identical blocks with a gray background using sew and flip corners. I sewed an extra line 1/2 inch away from the stitching line to get bonus HST's.

The bonus HST's became this quilt, which is also now assembled. So that's four quilt tops assembled and not piles of blocks in the sewing room anymore. I didn't add borders to any of these, nor am I going to.

Of course, I am sewing leader/ender units while I'm assembling quilts, so I'm making more blocks, but so far my leader/ender projects have been other UFO's or scrap projects. Even when I'm trying to not start new projects, I always consider a scrap project a "legal" start. If you don't keep the scraps flowing through your sewing room they will take over. 

One of the things I love about making kid or throw sized quilts, is instead of using wideback, I can bust some older fabrics on the backings. Most of these are wider than WOF, but not that much wider. Once I choose a fabric for each backing, I think I'm going to make them wider by adding a column of complementary scrap strips cut down similarly to a piano key border. It will be a great way to bust not only older fabrics but also some scrap strips from my Scrap User System, with a minimal amount of work. 

Finally Hit My Stride!

 Between DH being retired now, and doing quite a bit of traveling, trying to find a new normal is tough. Since I've been an empty nester, most days I went to the sewing room as soon as DH went to work. Even during the year he was working at home, work started at the same time every day, so when he went to his home office, I went to the sewing room. When he started working from home, I started matching my breaks to his, and we ate lunch together. I jokingly called it "Retirement Lite". 

I honestly didn't think it was going to be much of change once he retired, especially since he only retired from nursing, and still runs a business. He still spends a LOT of time in his office, so surely I can sew while he's working, right?

It took me longer to adjust than I expected, and largely because I hate waking up to an alarm. One of the things I was most looking forward to about DH retiring was no more alarms in the morning. It's not like we are sleeping until noon or anything, we usually get up between 6-7 am without an alarm, but now we have leisurely coffee time in the morning, which I love. DH is big on breakfast, but I hate eating as soon as I wake up. In the working days, I went and quilted for an hour, then I came up to eat breakfast. We never eat breakfast together because of my aversion to eating right away. The thing is, our leisurely coffee time, where we are reading the news and discussing everything from what's for dinner to world events, lasts anywhere from 45 minutes to almost two hours. If it's the longer period of time we both end up eating breakfast during that time. I am pretty much a cottage cheese and fruit girl, so not a lot of prep required. 

I really enjoy our new morning routine, and it's probably the most retirement-y thing we do. BUT, this new routine completely derailed my sewing routine. I've done the whole, quilt for an hour, eat breakfast on my break, get some household chores started then go back to sewing for years now. This week I finally figured out a way around that!

We eat lunch at noon, pretty much without fail. It's a predictable time. I realized if I switch my quilting time to after lunch, I could get myself into a new routine. This was huge! Why was this such a game changer? I was struggling with getting anything done. I didn't have anything basted and ready to quilt, and I had deadline quilts that needed to be made. I needed to baste something so I could do some quilting, and I needed to sew to get the deadline projects made. The thing is, I wasn't getting anything basted, and when I was sewing I was feeling so guilty about not spending any time quilting, I was distracted and not being as productive as normal. 

This week it all clicked. I didn't need to feel bad about not quilting, if I could make a consistent time to quilt. After lunch! Now I am sewing as much as I can in the morning, mostly switching between deadline projects and getting UFO's to the next stage. I'm seeing some real progress now that I'm in a better headspace.

After lunch, I go quilt for an hour, today that is some walking foot quilting, but earlier this week it was FMQ. After that hour, I spend some time either basting a quilt, cutting out other projects (Christmas stuff currently), or tidying up some of the disaster that is my sewing/fabric area. 

Now that I'm figuring out the new normal, I actually have a couple finishes! 

The quilt for my great-nephew is finished. It's finish #3 for the year.

I made his older sister a doll quilt, and it's finished too! I don't always count small finishes, but this year has been such a lousy year for quilting, I'm counting this as finish #4. I need the encouragement that I am indeed making progress. 

I'm feeling more encouraged than I have been in a while. We have quite a bit of traveling planned for the foreseeable future, but now that I figured out how to maximize my time at home, I'm feeling much better!

Running Late

This year has been so incredibly busy with non-quilt related stuff, I just keep falling further behind. 

 I did get to spend a great weekend with two of my grandsons, and two of the granddogs as well. We did some crafts, though nothing sewing related. We watched movies, ate cookies, and just had a fun weekend. Monday I didn't get much done, because even a good weekend with the grandkids can be tiring. 

I had hoped to get the overdue baby quilt done this week, but I still need to sew on the binding. I also realized I hadn't made his older sister a doll quilt, which I normally do if there are older sisters. (I've made older brothers quilts for their stuffed animals too, if they are into that) Since I didn't have a doll quilt ready, I looked through my orphan blocks to see if I had anything I could make into a doll quilt quickly.

I found a small pile of broken dishes blocks leftover from another project, and I came up with this layout. I have a piece of lavender minky just the right size to back it, and I know I have a batting scrap that will work. 

I've been piecing with a darker gray thread, but I'm almost finished assembling the next scooter quilt, as well as the blocks I've been using as leaders/enders while making it. To make this doll quilt, I really should use something with a white background as my leader/ender and switch to white thread. Since the scooter quilt is already in rows, my design wall was free, so I looked around the sewing room for something I could use as leader/enders. 

I found a stack of larger broken dishes blocks that I had made from bonus HST's from two other projects. I could have made a baby quilt with the one with white backgrounds, but I didn't really have enough of the gray background ones to do much with. I didn't have enough gray ones to make a border around the white ones, and no matter what I was going to have a couple blocks leftover. I opted to just bust as many blocks as I could in the same quilt, so I put an off center gray stripe down the quilt. I won't add borders, so the quilt will finish at 48x64, a good kid sized quilt. 

As far as things I actually got done in the past week, here they are...

1) Basted and quilted baby quilt, ready for binding.

2) Got scooter quilt sewn into rows

3) Almost done making alternate blocks for another UFO

4) Basted two more quilts, one smaller quilt for donation, one larger quilt for a gift. 

5) Cut out what should be enough 2.5x4.5" pieces for a potato chip quilt made from men's shirts. I will cut more if I need to, but I think this will be enough. 

6) got the doll quilt and another UFO on the design walls

It makes it seems like I got more done when I list it out. I think I tend to look at what isn't done more than what is done. I really need to get that scooter quilt finished so I can get it basted and then use my cutting table for cutting out the Christmas gifts! The holidays always come up faster than I think, and we've got quite a bit still coming up for this year.