Starry eyed finish for Friday

All Starry Eyed

19.5 by 17 inches

Machine pieced and quilted

Made entirely from other people's scraps.

This little quilt got its start from the scrap bag at a retreat I attended last month.

I'm not embarrassed to say I dug out these fun Allison Glass prints  and bright solids

from the common scrap bag that someone was going to make into a dog pillow.

I had several projects with me, all cut and ready to sew

but would you be surprised to hear that I had way more fun

playing with these elongated triangles in bright colours?

Mostly because I didn't know what they were going to be.

I just kept sewing them together as they fit.

When I got home, I found the same purple Allison Glass print in my cupboard,

so I added the corner squares,

free motioned the background to make the star points pop,

and then bound it in that orange dot print given to me by another friend.

Since it is a smallish quilt, I used corner triangles for a hanging sleeve.

The new owner is trading me a hand braided rug

for this quilt which she plans to hang in her office and brighten her day.

I have a cupboard full of fabric, so what does it say 

when I like playing with other people's scraps

more than the fabric I pick out for myself?

That's the reason my blog is still called Scraps and Strings.

I'm linking up with other Friday finishers here and here and here.

Design table Monday

This baby quilt is off the design wall and on to the picnic table outside

for a little photo shoot.

I just finished quilting paisleys in the white background

and feathers in the yellow beehive borders.

I'm linking up with Judy for her Design Wall Mondays.

Making the most of a small window

I seem to work best in fits and starts.

Today I had a couple of hours and put the borders on this,

bringing it up to 40 inches square.

On the weekend, I found this picnic tablecloth at the thrift store.

The print seemed familiar, and now I realize it's similar to the fabric

in the star points and corners.

I took five minutes to finish the binding on these potholders I strip-pieced a week or so ago

from batik scraps from my mother,

and backed and bound with that oldie but goodie landscape fabric below

which also yielded six  postcards.

And all this in only a couple of hours.

I even cleared off my sewing table and tidied my sewing space!

But I can't find my sewing shears or my favourite 6 by 12 inch ruler.

Anyone seen them?

I'm the scrappy go-to girl!

It pays to be good with scraps. This weekend at a quilt retreat, one of the participants had a last minute idea to make a prayer shawl for the retreat organizer, who recently got some bad news health wise. We had one evening and a box of tiny batik scraps to do it, and a few bigger bits of yardage.

 I made the wonky stars, set others to piecing the little bits together without a pattern (this was a new experience for some) and by 9 p.m.Friday we had this 34 by 72 inch prayer shawl. It took 12 quilters, an hour of knotting, a quick trip home for one person to get the flannel backing, and the combined efforts of a bunch of us to handsew the binding and the label, but we were finished completely by noon Saturday. The person it was intended for walked in two hours before we were done, but we carried on in front of her and she claims she didn't notice what we were doing. The photos above show the shawl in progress, a full length view, and the new owner wearing it.

Over and over, some of the other retreat folks told me this was the first time they had made something without a pattern and that they had learned they could just sew pieces together as they fit and puzzle it out.
One quilter carefully made a paper pieced block to fit into the shawl, and then went back to her sewing machine and quickly whipped up a wonky log cabin. The nice part of the whole experience is that a bunch of quilters learned they could do this without a pattern. A true lightbulb moment. And yes, the shawl was appreciated with tears and a smile, and even napped under.

Starry Tuesday and Canadian Tire money

It's just starting to snow here mid-afternoon on the last day in March, and I've cheered myself up by making a few stars for a baby quilt. I've been using pre-cut 3.5 inch squares and leftover blues, including an old calico print to make an all-blue and neutral baby blanket for the local children's hospital

These are the wonky stars laid out on the design wall. It will only measure 27 by 36 without borders, so I'll add wide navy borders to get it at least 36 wide. I'll back it with flannel and pillowcase finish it, and probably won't put a batting in it to make it more of a blanket than a quilt.

Wonky stars are like Canadian Tire money. I kept using the triangles I cut off under the star points to make more star points, so I never ran out. (Canadian Tire money is the loyalty program for that store ( you get a small percentage of the purchase back in CT money every time you buy something.) You can buy something with only CT money and they'll still give you some back. Here you can see the Wonky Star/Canadian Tire money effect in the small points in this star.

Same with this one, which has a scrappy light background, like the scrappy blue background in the one above. I was using whatever lights or blues were left to make the last stars.

Here's another Canadian Tire money example in wonky stars.

All in all, a fun project for a wintry afternoon, and the best part was I used up lots of old fabrics to make a pretty quilt for a sick baby. Win/win all around, dontcha think?

Little projects finished

I've had a couple of weeks of finishing a few things, interspersed with periods of no sewing. I've finally completed a tea cosy and table runner set that is part of an upcoming silent auction for my sons' school. I used 2 inch strips of b/w fabrics with squares and rectangles of bright prints. The runner finishes at 16 by 64 (from point to point) and has a black solid backing that I brought to the front for the binding. My friend Val machine quilted it in a swirly pattern -- thanks very much! (My old Elna is wonderful except I can't drop the feed dogs and even with covering them I can't seem to get the hang of machine quilting.)

Here's my latest square for the Friday Block Party. This was easier than many, since it only had the HSTs to worry about. My precision piecing is getting better. A friend commented that these precision blocks aren't my usual style -- that's what makes them interesting. I can manage one a week, and I'm getting better with HSTs and the quarter inch thing. That can only be good, even if I prefer wonkiness and free-piecing and scrappy. I'm building skills and following rules for an hour a week, and the rest of the time, I'm doing what I want.

Like these wonky stars, made from leftover triangles from my friend Andrea. I was helping her manage her scraps and she didn't want these. There were exactly 16, just enough to make two wonky stars for the Australian Bushfire quilt project (see sidebar.) I pieced the centres from leftovers after we cut most of Andrea's leftover 2.5 inch strips into 4.5 inch bricks for a scrappy Chinese Coin quilt.

Here's four more in brights. The print in the bottom left star is 60 inches wide. I bought about 90 inches of it so I can back a single quilt with it (it was $5/metre) and I cut off five inches to use in these stars.

Stars and Roses?

I've made a huge bouquet of roses -- 14 of them so far. I like them just as a bouquet, joined with green, but then I thought the colours might go with my wonky stars, now sewn together in a wonky nine-patch, waiting for borders.

So I tried that, laid out on my sewing room floor on black yardage. It definitely needs something more, but this is a start. These have been fun to make -- all of the stars and the roses have been made from scraps. I did cut into fat quarters and bigger pieces for the star backgrounds and star points, but the roses were all strips in my huge scrap bag. This could grow to a double-sized quilt quickly, but does it work?

I was thinking of a Gwen Marsten combo of piecing and applique here, but I'm open to possibilities. Or I have the beginnings of two great quilts.

Pink tic tac toe

I was trapped in my sewing room/office this morning while my husband was sanding the oak floors in the front hall. The sander made too much noise for me to concentrate on my writing work, so I sewed instead. I got out the pinks and the neutrals and started making liberated stars. I borrowed Gwen Marston's Liberated Quiltmaking from the library last week, and just as Tonya and all the others have promised, I was inspired. I'm hoping to buy the book sometime if it goes back into print.
I played around with the sizes of the nine patch blocks, and with a little adding here or there and a little subracting, I'm going to sew this together. I think its going to be a multiple medallion quilt -- the nine patch stars are making up a wonky bigger nine patch centre medallion. It will need borders, and I may leave it crib size or get it to throw size. I'd like to handquilt in the bigger neutral squares and put a border of smaller squares in the reverse colours around the border. So far, it's is just playing, which is all I have the energy for when my whole house is full of dust, and I really should be working.

Life is a field trip

Today is the last day of school, and I finished the quilt for the teacher with about 12 hours to spare. Here it is with my two sons, who each spent three years with this teacher (her name is Sid) in a multi-aged classroom, called Room 303. Since they overlapped by one year, our family had Sid as a teacher for five years. The son in the yellow is just crawling out of bed for his last day of elementary school. (In Canada, elementary school usually goes until the end of June. We start up again after Labour Day or the first weekend in September.)
I backed it with flannel, put a bamboo batting in it, and handquilted it on the diagonal through the darker squares and around the stars. I used cotton quilting thread for the borders and some of the stars, but most of it is quilted in big stitches with perle cotton and a big needle I broke several needles with it, after I learned from embroiderers one can't quilt with a chenille needle -- I was supposed to stab stitch, not load up multiple stitches. This is made up entirely of scraps, with those four patches in the nine patch blocks from the 2 inch square box, and the bigger patches from my mother's scrap pile. There's some very old prints here, but I was going for a muted effect with the nine patches, and it works. The stars are wonky a la Gwen Marston, and I used Tonya's letters for the top and bottom. In case you can't read it, it says "Life is a field trip" on the top and the bottom says "Sid, star of 303."


I think you can see some of the quilting in this picture. You can certainly see the busy little prints from the early 80s. Not my favourites, but they just blend together for the most part. I am wishing that I tea-dyed those white squares on the 9 patch on the right. Too late. This is a true scrap quilt, which is exactly what Sid has to do as a teacher every year. She takes a bunch of students who don't necessarily fit together, and by the end of the year, they're working together as a group. They're still individuals, but they've learned to respect and appreciate each other. Huge life lessons, and we're grateful we had a great elementary school teacher like her.
For those of you with eagle eyes, can you spot the Hoffman Painted Desert fabrics in here? They're all visible in the top picture of the whole quilt. There are three colourways of it (the light patches, in the words, and the border/binding fabric.) I really used a lot of old fabrics in this quilt.

Stars and nine patches

It's another finish from the two-inch square box! This time I used all the mediums, and went for a muted look in the four-patch nine-patches. I also used up lots of uglies from the 80s in the light print -- click for a closer look at the busy little calicos. No yardage was sacrificed for this project (OK, I did cut the borders from yardage) with most of it from the two-inch square box or other smallish pieces from the stash)and Mom's stash. It measures 45 by 63 without the narrow border, and I'm planning on adding words and names in a wider border to make it a nice throw size. This is intended for an amazing elementary school teacher we've had for the past five years, and I'm going to put her name and some of her favourite sayings around the edge. I'm going to back it with a nice flannelette and machine quilt it on the diagonal. Here's a closer look at some of the wonky stars and the background fabrics.