Scrappy blocks

Actually spent a little time sewing this weekend - miracle! I made some blocks using scraps from my strip bag, combined with a wider strip of black (or neutral) down the centre. Not sure what I'm going to do with them now, but it was nice to cut scraps and sew fabric.

A bit of scrappy sewing

Despite being on holiday for nearly a week now, I haven't done much sewing. Partly this is due to being busy with some other things, partly this is due to being tired. But yesterday I finally got around to doing something - decided to have a small tackle of my scrap basket (didn't make a huge dent in that, to be honest) and make up some blocks using pre-cut squares.  These little blocks with two squares and a rectangle will be useful in combination with other stuff. They are only 4.5" square, so could be put together in fours, like below, 

or offset with solid blocks. Or who knows, something else perhaps!

Here's the scrap basket before/after - some difference, though it's still pretty full.

State of the Scrapbaskets

Lots of bits and pieces happening around here means lots of stuff going in the scrapbasket and strip bag. Not long before Something Will Have to Be Done about them...

More scrappy happiness

So, the scraps from yesterday have started going into blocks. I stitched the 3" squares together into twos...

...and then threes.

Then attached a strip to them, and put another row of three down the other side of the strip.

Here's the bunch all in progress - finished blocks on the left, but all the other pieces still waiting.

Using up some scraps

So this weekend I felt like patchwork, rather than putting together blocks or putting borders on tops, or whatever. I took my 3" square stash...

I took some wide strips from my strip stash, though most of them weren't wide enough as I wanted ones which were at least 3" wide and cut them into 8" lengths.

So I moved on over to my box of multi-colour FQs, to slice some more strips from that. Pictures tomorrow of what I've started to put together from them...

Scrappy bias binding

I mentioned yesterday that I was going to have a go at making a scrappy bias binding to go on the Woodland Baby Quilt I've been working on. After a little browsing around on the web, I decided to have a play and see what happened.  First I cut some strips of my scrappy fabrics - these are the same fabrics I used in the body of the quilt, as the borders of the little squares. I worked out that I needed to start with a 20" square in order to make continuous bias binding (calculate the length of binding needed, in my case approx 176 inches, multiply by width of binding - 2.25" for me - then find the square root of that for the length of the sides of your square - mine came out to something like 18.9 - hence, 20"), so I cut an appropriate number of strips in the right width.

This is really not a tutorial - there are some good ones on the web if you want one - just a little commentary on what I did.

I sewed these together, realised they weren't quite wide enough, so added another strip of a different fabric I used to make up the difference.

Once I had a square, I cut it in half along the diagonal. 

And then stiched the two halves back together to make a rhombus/parallelogram/whatever.  After that, you turn it over and mark your strips in pencil along the back. I hate this part, and was reminded why I don't normally make continuous bias binding.

Once that's done, you line up the edge of one side of the fabric with the first drawn line on the other side and stitch it together to make a tube.

You then use scissors to cut on the line to make your strip. It's a very clever method, if a bit fiddly. With single fabric binding I would never, ever bother. However, the effect achieved for this scrappy binding might just about be worth the effort...

Once it's folded and pressed, you can see I've got loads of changes in the fabric; there's no way I'd make French fold binding with this many pieces, that's for sure.

Scrap update

...and here's the state of the scrap basket/strip bag at the end of the recent clearout & block making fest. Ok, there's some stuff there, but I probably now have at least 6 months worth of space to put new scraps in again before it all gets out of control. Which is nice!

The start of something scrappy

So, here's what's happening with the scrap basket pieces - I took the tiny offcut HST units (leftover from the chunky windmills) and used them as starter blocks for some scrappy log cabin type blocks.  I still need to go around these a couple times more (which is good, because I haven't even touched the strip bag yet, and it's getting full, too), but they'll be nice scrappy blocks when I'm done. Not sure how big they will be - depends on how many strips I have, I guess!

Scrappy square cutting

So,  a couple of hours of cutting alongside some sewing today, and I have lots of different sized squares, from 2" to 6.5", ready to file away for future projects. And of course, I also have lots of smaller pieces which need to be stitched into crumb blocks!

What's left

As a descrapping exercise, this one was pretty good - got rid of all of my 3.5" squares, and some of my 4" squares.

Of course, there's a good selection of scraps for both the scrapbasket and the strip bag...

Scraps & Leftovers

Of course, any good project creates some scraps and leftovers - these are what was left from the blocks I showed yesterday. The left hand pile will go in the scrap basket, the middle into the strips bag and on the right are the pieces large enough to put back into stash - this includes the leftovers of the train border from those two recent tops...

Black and pink...the leftovers

I don't know why I'm always surprised at the scrap bag/basket growing so much and needing to be thinned out - every time I do any sort of project, I get scraps generated - like above...

Of course the upside of that is that I get a nice stack of blocks to go along with my scraps:

Leftover strings

After making the string blocks the other day, here's what's left in the bag. There's still some stuff there, but it's a lot less. I didn't use any of the rolled strips I've made previously for sewing together bigger strip quilts, and there were some misc. strips left as well.  But it's a lot less full in that bag than it was. Of course, now my scrap basket is getting full - it never ends!

Brown reduction

And yes, all that brown work has reduced the brown stash a bit - it now fits in one rather full CD box, rather than two partly full ones. Progress!  I'm happy to have a stash, but not a stash which has a silly amount of fabric I won't ever use...

And some scraps were generated - strips and small bits. I wonder if it's time to have a look in the strip bag again to see how full it's becoming...

A bit more stitching

Too many of these (multicoloured prints)...

So I made some of these (5 strip rail fence blocks with neutrals)  and cut more to stitch together.

Which gave me these (extra strips for the strip bag and scraps for the scrap basket)

And now there's some space. Not much, but some.

Scraps/more I-spy

A load of scraps for the scrap basket/strip bag/squares drawers, from cutting the I-spy blocks. I decided to cut all the novelties into 5" squares - what I don't use in actual I-spy blocks will go in the 5" square drawer, for easy access later. That's the small pile at left in this photo.  Two piles of strips - one in random widths - what was left if I cut strips from a small piece of fabric - and one in 2.5" strips - the extras from the pieces I actually used in the blocks. And finally, a pile for the scrap basket of offcuts in various sizes. Easy to see how scraps generate themselves when you do pretty much any project!

And here are two more stacks of I-spy blocks, waiting to be assembled - one has 12 blocks, one has 15. So there will be blocks for two more I-spy tops. They always go down well with kids.  At some point in the near(ish) future, I'm going to do something similar with other novelties - girly ones, or maybe just some general, mixed ones. 

What's in that string bag now...

As you can see, those recent projects with strings and strips have made an excellent dent in the bag of strings - just a few rolls of various width strips to use up. Which means I can fit lots more strings in the bag once again!

A different sort of string project

And of course, even after two strip tops and three Little Mermaids, there were still strings and strips left, so I decided to make some more traditional string blocks. My Project Linus coordinator, Liz, says that quilts with purple in them are always in high demand, so I decided to use some purple strips down the middle of each block to unify them and add purple interest.  There are 36 of these 6" blocks - and yes, there are still some strips left, but not nearly so many....

The last little mermaid

And a third one - good way to use up a not-very-big piece of that mermaid fabric, which needs to be a reasonable size because of the large print...

Little Mermaid 2

And here's another variation on that theme - this one with more strips in to make it more elongated.