Happy Quilt #3, and Breaking Down the Scraps

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

It's a frosty morning here in Wisconsin, but the sun is shining and it might get up to 50 degrees F today.  No rain, so I'm hanging out the last of my Happy Blocks baby quilts made from my Rainbow Scrap Challenge squares.

I enjoyed finding a home for all these light-background novelty prints.  I hope the child who receives it enjoys it.

The back is this cute kids print.  A friend gave it to me knowing it would make a great back.  Thanks, Nancy!

One of the best parts of being a scrap quilter is all the variety!

Are you a scrap quilter?  Do bags and boxes and totes of scrap fabric set your heart pounding with excitement?  (Yeah, me too!)  Do friends, family, and random people give you scraps?  Do you actually BUY scraps to use in your quilting?  If so, you know what I mean by breaking down the scraps:  making them into useful pieces for quilts.  Lately I've been working on scraps I acquired at our guild's annual Silent Auction.

When I say "scraps", I mean pieces smaller than a fat quarter.  If they're big enough, say 6 in. wide or wider, I don't cut into them, I put them in the Big Scraps basket to cut as needed.  

The smaller ones take more work.  I'm talking about strips, small scraps, etc.  LOTS of etc.
 

I often find strips in scraps from other quilters, which is great.  If they're already a width I normally use, even better!  I can just store them in my personal Scrap Savers System, an idea made famous by the amazing Bonnie Hunter.  The scrap strips above are NOT widths I use, or are irregular cuts, etc. so they will have to be pressed and trimmed or cut down.

If the strips are a good width like these 2.5 in. ones above, but are short, I cut them into squares and rectangles. 

After strips, I tackle the small pieces, cutting these also into squares and rectangles.  It's a bit more tedious, so I do a small stack before working on other projects.

It sure feels good to see them neatly stacked, ready to sew!

Now for the Etcetera, which is what I call pieces sewn to other pieces.  Many of these are strip sets, already sewn together, or the ends of strip sets from which pieces have been cut by the original quilter.  There are also badly made blocks and parts of blocks, which I guess the quilter gave up on but couldn't throw away.

I often wonder what other people do with these.  If you use them, I'd love to know your method.

Here's a weird one:

The fabrics are cute.  How could I make this useful?

I cut this up into 3 hsts (2.5 in. x 2.5 in.), 2 squares (2 in. x 2 in.), and four small bits for crumb quilts.  There was a second one of these, and I did the same thing with it.

The most common etc. I find are 2.5 in. strips sewn together.  This is a great size that I use often, and cutting them apart would make them too small.  If at least one of the strips is something I know I'll use, I put them in a basket with a seam ripper, and rip them apart while watching TV.  Ripping is a drag, of course, but I hardly notice it when solving a mystery with Hercule Poirot or "baking" with the Great British Baking Show.

As I was sorting and cutting and ripping, I found lots of 2.5 in. squares, many with novelty prints.  Treasure!  I added some from my stash and cut alternate blocks of a gray print, to make this little 4 patch top:

 It was great to have these squares for leaders and enders while working on other projects.  I hope to get it quilted soon.

 Snicky is good company in the sewing room, although he hasn't quite left his life of crime behind.  I have got my eye on you, Furry Friend.

Halloween is over, but a patchwork ghost made an appearance in our house! Buddy is pretending to run away.  These guys crack me up.

I hope your week is ghost free and full of fun.  And to all the veterans everywhere, Happy Veterans Day!  And THANK YOU!!!

Thanks for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Sarah at Can I Get A Whoop Whoop

Angela at So Scrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap

 

More Orange, John Deere, and Amanda

Welcome to Treadlestitches!

This week's orange blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge are 16 patches, with 8 different orange prints and 8 different light prints.  These are fun to make. 

The cute carrot fabric came from my friend Joey's scraps, as did some other yummy orange prints.

I think that's my favorite part of making quilt blocks--putting together adorable scraps.

Where do all these scraps come from?  Well, here's one place--my local quilt store!  They have a giant basket of scraps that customers are welcome to root through.  We can fill up a bag for a small price, and take them home.  Wanna see what I got?

All this was in that bag!  Good quality fabric scraps, just waiting to be made into quilts.

Like this one!  I finished the little farm quilt this week.
 

The blue and white striped "My John Deere" fabric was a small piece I bought in an antique mall, and I used up nearly every bit of it.

The dark blue squares and the narrow inner border were in the same fat quarter bundle I got at a recent quilt show.  (I always look for whatever fabrics are marked down at the show, of course.  Don't you?) 

The batting is poly.  I cut it from a thicker poly and then just pulled it in half to make it thinner.  It actually worked!  Still soft, but not quite as puffy.  And there's another half ready to be used!  Bad news, though, it means I can make twice as many quilts from the giant batting  rolls Joey got for me.  Gotta sew faster!

The back of the quilt is this John Deere tractor print.  The quilt will be donated to Project Linus locally.  I'm hoping it will go to some little farm girl or boy.  God bless the farmers, we all need them.

More scraps are in my new project above.  (Check out the scrap from the farm quilt!  Leftovers from one quilt go into the next one, of course!  And on and on forever!)

The block is called Amanda, and comes from Me and My Sister Designs.  I've had this book forever, but just suddenly realized it would be perfect for my 3.5 in. squares and 1.5 in. wide strips.

Here's the front cover of the book, it's 3 Times the Charm, by Barbara Groves and Mary Jacobson.  They call it that because each quilt pattern is made up into three quilts, and most of the pieces can be cut from charm squares.  All of the patterns have women's names.  There are 3 more books in the series.

My 1.5 in. wide strips live in this little overnight case.  I sorted them, and separated out the light prints, solids, pinks, and blacks.  The big pile is Everything Else.  Amanda is going to be a fun quilt!

I may use the black prints for this project, but not the others.  I also moved the very short strips to the schnibbles box to be made into crumb blocks. 

Now that the kids are well again, we're having fun on the playground!  It seems I always take a photo of one or another of them inside this orange tube during orange month!  Our Little Guy was thrilled to be climbing up it again and enjoying the nice weather.

Rain is expected for this weekend, so we'll try to enjoy the sunshine while we can.  I'm wishing sunshine and scrappy fun for you too this week.

Cheers for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Sarah at Can I Get A Whoop Whoop  

Angela at So Scrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap

 

 

Light Blue Scraps, and Antique Scrap Quilts

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

Sorry about being gone last week.  I went to a family reunion in New Jersey.  More about that next week.

Did you guess this was a pinker?

First, a little bit about this fun little device.  It's a Singer pinker, a clever gadget that cuts a pinked edge into fabric, leather, even paper.  I put a picture of one up on last week's very abbreviated blog.

The fabric fits under the cutting wheel, and you turn the crank.  Unfortunately mine doesn't have the original clamp that would hold it to the table, so when I use it I always wish I had one more hand. 

It was popular in the 1930s, and is much easier to use than pinking shears in my opinion, even without a clamp to hold it to the table.  For more information, click HERE.

Meanwhile, I was piecing my light blue scraps into my Rainbow Scrap Challenge projects.  This one is Razzle Dazzle.

As usual, it's a sort of organized chaos.  So much fun to sew!

And lastly, the light blue crayon, shown here on my refrigerator.  (It's really hard to find a place to photograph it!)

I only have a very small scrap of the penguin fabric, so I made sure to put it near the top.

I can't believe it's almost time to put the RSC quilts together!  This year has gone by so fast.

And so has this month!  Here we are at the last Saturday of September.

So that means it's time for antique quilts.

Recently I bought this little top from another collector who was "thinning the herd".

Here it is laid out on a queen sized bed.  Even with a border, it will be a small quilt when finished, suitable for a crib or for display.

The pattern is Ocean Waves, pieced by hand, with yellow solid squares.  The fabrics date from the 1930s/1940s.  There are literally thousands of half square triangles.

As you can see from the ruler, these hsts are less than an inch square!  I cannot imagine cutting all these triangles by hand, let alone piecing them.  Maybe that's why the quilt isn't any bigger--it was just too much work!

Here's the back, with all those tiny seams.

I plan to finish this top with vintage backing, cotton batting, and some simple machine quilting.  But first, I have to figure out how I'm going to finish the edge.

For our second quilt, I chose another scrap quilt from the 1930s, but it is very different than the first one.

At first glance, it looks like just random scraps sewn together.  It's actually more organized than that.

The rectangular scraps are sewn vertically into strips about 3 inches wide in every other row.  The adjoining rows have the rectangles sewn horizontally in segments approximately 3 in. x 4 in., and then joined together across the quilt.

Here's the yardstick for a reference.  I believe many of these scraps to be from feed and/or flour sacks.  There are also dress prints, and even flannels.

All of the sewing here is by machine.  It's not quilted, but tied with red wool yarn instead.  In place of batting, there is a thin piece of flannel between the layers.

Check out the back!  This is a true scrap quilt.

I bought this quilt at a flea market, and I must admit, I just sort of felt sorry for it.  At the time, I was doing an annual bed peel at our quilt group's quilt show, and I needed examples of more "homely" quilts, ones that were made from whatever was on hand, to keep people warm and comfortable. 

It wasn't until I got home with it that I started looking more closely at how it was made.  Now I'm thinking this might be a fun idea for a new quilt.  It would definitely use up scraps!

Here's another fun idea--playing with trains with my Little Guy.

I hope you're having fun in the week ahead!  For my money, quilting is the most fun of all.

All the best,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

I can't wait to see what everybody's been up to this week!

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy, Home of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge  

Cynthia at Oh Scrap