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!