Treadlestitches: scrap processing

Saturday, September 21, 2024

Rainbow Strings, Black Blocks, and Breaking A Bad Habit

Welcome to Treadlestitches!

It's still summer here, over 80 degrees every day which is unusual for late September. My only complaint is the lack of rain, but we may get some this weekend.

As long as the weather holds, I'll be taking pictures outside. I'm calling this little quilt Rainbow Strings, and it's my first Rainbow Scrap Challenge finish for 2024's blocks.

The border is a dark print, in honor of September being dark month at the RSC. Just kidding, I just liked it with the strings because of all the colors. It looks like fireworks to me. I bought this piece in an antique shop in Bloomington, Indiana, when we were there for the eclipse.

The backing is also rainbow--rainbow stripes! I had to add a strip of solid fabric each at the top and bottom to make it long enough.

I tried to lay the quilt out to get a flat photo, but somebody thought it was play time. Snicky! What are you doing?

I distracted him with a toy and quickly snapped this photo.

The quilting is diagonal lines in serpentine stitch, 3 lines across each 6 in. square.

There will be more string quilts to come, as I made a LOT of string blocks this year.

Black Blocks

Black scraps are fun in these potato chip blocks! This block has 2 penguin prints, 2 cat prints, buttons, jelly beans, stars, stripes, and a Harry Potter symbol.

Here are the rest of them!

Also, I made these black hexagon blocks for my 1800s reproduction quilt. They look kind of dull just by themselves...

but much better when mixed with the other colors! Someone once told me black prints are to a scrap quilt like salt is to food--they enhance the "flavor". This is a bigger quilt, and a more long-term project.

Breaking Bad Habits (or Trying To)

This mess is evidence of one of my Bad Habits. Most of these pieces are leftovers from backing. For many years I have mostly used light fabrics for backing (can you tell?). When I finished a quilt and trimmed off the extra backing, I had the bad habit of just stuffing the backing strips in a basket for "later".

Well, it's later. I have more time now that my grandsons are in school all day, so my excuse for not dealing with this has evaporated. Oh, dear. This is a LOT.

Remember this old joke? How do you eat an elephant? The punch line is One bite at a time. I would prefer not to think about consuming endangered animals, but I get the idea. We can do lots of hard things by breaking them down into manageable steps. So I started.

Step one was sorting out the few colorful prints and trimming them up into useful pieces. There weren't very many, so that didn't take long. Next, I divided the light strips into piles by width--small, medium, and large. For the next week, I would take a pile to the ironing board, iron at least 10 strips, and trim them to useful widths. If they were too short, I cut them into squares and/or rectangles. It felt great to finish a pile, and that helped me keep going.

This is what I ended up with. The strips are 4.5 in., 3.5 in., 2.5 in, and 2 in. wide. All this has been added to the Parts Department for future quilts. And now when I finish a quilt, I'm cutting up the backing strips as soon as I trim the quilt!