Leftover strata pieces............

Last week I cleaned out 2 drawers in a cabinet in the basement and these leftover pieces were in one of them.  They are from a project about 3 years ago.  I started playing with them to see what I could make with them.

I finally decided to just make mug rugs from them.  The six on the right have all of the same fabric group in each of them.  The 3 on the left have mixed groups.  They aren't masterpieces by any means but they will look better when they have some matching fabric binding on them.

Sneak Peak..........

Time to clean off the cutting table.  I trimmed all of these "ends" into straight strips and I'll use them for mug rugs.

Progress reports are supposed to be on Fridays for the "Fractured" quilt but here is a sneak peek of how my reds and grays are working together.  Each pair of 5" strips makes 2 blocks so I have to decide whether I'm using the duplicates in this quilt or just one of each.

Playing with blocks......

I didn't sew at all yesterday.  I went to a session of cutting for Quilts of Valor in the morning.  In the afternoon I pulled out all of the Kaffe leftover blocks and put them on a design wall.  I can see I don't have enough to do anything with yet so they went back into the box.  I have my next quilt in mind and started pulling fabrics but didn't make any decisions yet.  I need to sew a backing seam and get another quilt loaded on my longarm while I work on the fabric selection.

I only need one more...........

Here is Rosemary smoothing out the final edge of her log cabin quilt.  The blocks are paper pieced and finish about 4.5".  Since she made some random fabric placement and some dark/light diagonal halves she just put them together in a random placement.  I just love it.  I give her almost all of my scraps so I recognized a lot of the fabrics as we basted.

After we finished basting I got out my boxes of orphan blocks.  These are all batiks.

More batik orphan blocks.

Last night I pieced 3 more blocks.  I haven't sewn the corners on the crazy pieced blocks yet so the fabric may change.  I will also have to figure out if I want the 3 crazy pieced blocks near each other or scattered randomly.  Actually if I put the third one in the bottom corner it may look like 2 eyes and a mouth.

Playing with a new idea..........

This is a pile of leftover Kaleidoscope wedges from a demo I did with the last class.  I dug them out because I wondered if they would work on a project I wanted to start.  One of the blogs I read is nifty quilts.  Click here and go see what she has on her design wall and then I'll explain where these wedges come into the picture.

I have the same book as she has so I could go to it to see the inspiration quilt.  I emailed her and asked if she was strip piecing and cutting wedges. I knew most people doing this pattern are piecing it one strip at a time on paper like she said she is doing.  I figured if you need 8 wedges alike why not strip piece it, cut it with a Kaleidoscope ruler and add it on all in one chunk.  She encouraged me to write a blog post about my idea.

I photocopied it in black and white so I could draw the seam lines with a red pen to see how the pattern evolves.  Then since my wedges were already made I had to work backwards for the measurement of the center piece between 2 wedges.  I cut a square I thought would be a finished size and and cut it corner to corner both directions (for 4 triangles) and then drew the center piece in and added the seam allowances and then cut it out.

I have it almost right.  I went to the basement and got my black and white leftover scraps from a Strips n Curves quilt and pieced onto them and then cut out the shape.  I need a tiny bit more seam allowance so that means it's a little too small.  I will probably just make a small quilt from the wedges I have and use a totally different group of fabrics if I make the real quilt.  The planning and figuring out is the fun (and sometimes frustrating) part.

Last layout, top sewn, playing with leftovers

One last layout with the small blocks. I call this one Kissing Seahorses. I haven't made any decision about which layout I will use, or whether it will have a border. I did sew the big blocks together. It always looks so much better sewn than just blocks on the design wall. I am putting a border on this one so that it fits a twin bed a little better. I haven't decided which color to emphasize with the border.

If you have been reading my blog for awhile you probably know that part of cleaning up the cutting table after making a project is gathering the little scraps and playing with them. I have 2 postcards started and a mini wallhanging.

I am at 965 posts right now so I may use these for part of a give away for my 1000th post. Unlike some of the other blog give aways, mine will just be for my regular readers and not to be advertised to everyone else. Sitemeter tells me I have about 550 people a day that check on my blog. That means that in about 12 days I should have my 260,000th reader. Maybe the give away will be then instead. I am just thinking out loud here right now. I missed the 250,000th reader by about 4 hours. I knew it was coming up and then I was gone for part of the day and the sitemeter only tells me the last 100 readers and it was about 226 back.

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Susan Turney warmed my heart with her comment the other day that she enjoys going through my older posts by using the Label List which is on the right side of my page. I know so many people read through a reader or feed program and they never really come to the actual blog that way. I try to label each post so that the Label list will take you to all pages related to the subject. There are hundreds of pictures there to see as well as lots of info. Several people have mentioned I should write a book, but everything I could say is already here for you in the previous posts. Thank you Susan.

Last June finish

This is the last finished project for June, the last finished project for the first half of the year. Where does the time go? I consider this a table runner because it is the right size and shape. I suppose someone might hang it vertically in a narrow place as a wall hanging. I really doubt if anyone has a dining room that this would go with. I just did ditch quilting on all of the seam lines and wavy line quilting in the borders. I started doing wavy line quilting in borders in 1994 and I always fall back to it when no other idea seems better. Click on the picture below for a closer view.
If you haven't signed up for the Blogiversay giveaway, there is still time until midnight July 4. Go back to Sunday's post and leave your comment for your choice or email me. There are only 6 people in 2 of the categories and 12 in 2 others so the odds for winning are pretty good. I am really enjoying this connection with some of the readers who don't usually leave comments. I have found a few new blogs to read through it and I love hearing that some of you read my blog every day.

Playtime

Do you allow yourself any playtime? Do you ever just piece fabrics together just because you like the colors together?

Playtime is essential to get you into a "zone" where time flies and you are surrounded by peace and contentment.

You can make rules for what you are doing, like strips are no longer than 22" or I will only use yellow if you want to, or you can just play with the scrap bin and whatever happens, happens.

The result of all of those playtimes is a box of pieces and parts. When you start playing with them up on a design wall you get even more ideas.

Michael5000 mentioned in the comments that he wouldn't have thought of framing my crazy log cabin quilt from a couple days ago with the angled strips. That actually happened because of playtime. I added 4 different fabrics from my "clean up cuts" box and because they weren't straight cuts to start out with I had to square up the quilt. I experimented by folding back edges to see how much to trim and came up with the angled cuts.

All I can say is PLAY, PLAY, PLAY!! You may come up with the most exciting piece you have ever made.

VickiW has finished our second collaborative quilt for our wounded soldiers (QOV). Scroll down for the red/white/blue hearts and stars flannel quilt.

From the archives

Here is another wallhanging made from the scraps and leftovers of another quilt. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of the original quilt. This might remind you of the quilt top below that I posted previously and that is because they are both from the same set of scraps.
I think I have that color scheme out of my system and won't have to use it again. The grayed purples aren't available as much now anyway.

The sun is beaming in on me again today, the fourth day in a row. And........it is above freezing!

Between things

I worked on the machine quilting of one piece that I may send to the IL Artisans' Gallery in southern IL. The deadline is tomorrow for the paperwork and I haven't made any decisions. There is a church in Chicago that accepts quilts and tops for sale at their one day show and sale, and again the deadline is tomorrow for the paperwork. I haven't been able to concentrate on this either.

So I decided to pull out a piece from 3 or 4 years ago that needs borders. I had originally planned on this border; strips of a batik with little leftover patchwork worked in here and there.
Then last year I found this batik and thought maybe it was just right.
Here is a shot of both borders at the same time.
I also made a little piece out of the leftovers. I have had this up on my wall for 2 years trying to decide what is wrong with the borders. I have trimmed a couple times and think I still need to have narrower borders on a couple sides. Meanwhile I stare at it every day hoping the decision will come.
We got more snow last night, maybe 2", but it is above freezing already so the roads should be clear soon. Maybe my head will clear too.

In the Archives

This first piece is from the "Needs to be Finished" box and I was looking in my old pictures on my computer for the piece that these scraps are from. I never did find it so I guess I don't have a picture of it and I donated it to a new nursing home that was in need of color hanging on their great room walls. I made the blocks for the original piece in 1992 thinking I would make them into a jacket. Months later I decided to make them into a quilt. All of the little leftovers were just so neat and fun looking that I started sewing them together and ended up with this. This part is kind of the focal point where I added that Dutch wax fabric with the bird.
The block below was one left over from the quilt. I made strip piecing out of 3 wider and 2 narrower strips then cut squares, and then triangles. It was a pretty subdued quilt for me because having planned it for a jacket originally, patchwork for jackets should be more subdued.
While searching the archives on my oldest computer, I found this picture which wasn't in my desktop computer. It was my class sample for Victoria's Garden, a quilt in "Blended Quilts" by McCloskey and Yenter.
It has more of a decorator look to it, subdued and lots of medium value, so that it would just blend into a room and not be the first thing you saw.

Using leftover blocks

I had made a red and yellow wallhanging and a purple wallhanging also from the Easy Pieces blocks. That was before I had a digital camera, so therefore no pictures. I had leftovers of both kinds of blocks and was determined to just use them up. I sold this piece earlier this year, as a quilt top. Just in case you think I really am only feeding the squirrels, I thought you should see I have other visitors to the suet cages.
I don't know what this little bird below is. He is white and gray and has a head that tapers right into his beak. They dart around really fast, almost like hummingbirds do, so this was the best picture I could get.
It has been really cold here so it is fun to just look out at the creatures. I will have to go out and refill some of them soon though.

Layouts

I had some 4 patches left over from the quilt on my guest bed, so earlier this year I took a batch of floral prints strips and created some log cabin blocks. The fun of log cabins is the layout. There are so many layouts for half light/half dark blocks. These aren't the prettiest blocks, not what I would have made if I had specially cut certain fabrics for the project. These are reminiscent of pioneer blocks where you use what you have.
I have made many log cabin quilts with lots of different layouts and they each have their own graphic beauty.
Since I only have 12 blocks they may be used for table runners, or maybe a baby quilt, or...........

Using Leftovers

I always have a lot of long skinny scraps from the clean up cut on my batiks. One day I just sewed a bunch together and then sliced them off into irregular shaped strips. I had 2 sets that I was working from and kept flipping them end to end so the colors didn't line up all the time. Again, my favorite border fabric is some kind of a zebra print. I used Jane Sassaman's dotted fabric for the alternate bars.

Little Zebra

I made this piece about 14 years ago. The leftovers from the ends of strip sets from "Strips That Sizzle" were laying on my cutting table. Also a piece of the jungle fabric with the half zebra along the selvage was there. I started sewing the little end pieces together and all of a sudden I thought why not have that half zebra sewn between 2 of the strips. Then I started looking for border fabrics that the zebra could be sewn across.This piece is 11 3/4" x 12 3/4" so it was an easy size to handle for intricate machine quilting. I always take it to my machine quilting classes to show the students. The first thing they say is how hard it must have been to quilt something that small. Only after they have tried quilting a large piece do they appreciate how easy it is to do a small piece.
I love the way the zebra seems to be "coming out of the woodwork" as the old saying says. The pieced section is quilted like a jungle with big leaves. Now I know I am taking artistic liberty here because I don't believe zebras live near the jungle. I did tiny little meandering in the red area, now known as stippling, however that word was never used back in the early 1990's, it was always called meandering.
A close up of the jungle quilting, and the funny part of photography, it looks like hand stitching but I have always machine quilted (since 1957). You should be able to click on the pictures for a closer view.

Crazy Mobile

That is what I named this piece, "Crazy Mobile". I have each crazy pieced block touching at least one other block so they are attached in a curving string. Because I used all one batik as the background it seemed like a mobile dangling in space when I was done. This piece hangs in the eating area of my remodeled kitchen (that I tackled last Oct). You can see just a sliver of my red wall at the top edge of the picture.
I sewed together all of the blocks left from the batik quilt I showed last Sunday and it is a baby quilt size. I only have one block left after that, to put in the misc. leftovers box.

More Purple and Yellow

This is one of my favorite quilts. I made it while teaching log cabin quilt classes for our local community college. I know it wasn't made before 1992 because it has some of the commemorative Christopher Columbus stripe fabric in the border. I think it was probably finished by 1993 however. It is twin size and is often on a twin bed in my sunshine yellow guest bedroom. I had already made at least a dozen log cabin quilts previously so I had tried most of the traditional layouts. One thing about log cabin though, if you have made one, you probably will want to make another, with the variety of layouts you can use. Here are 2 more pictures of the leftovers from the color study.
These are the leftover ends of strips from cutting the squares and the triangles so I could continue on and make more blocks. My only problem is that I would want to add more new fabrics, not continue with the old ones.

Color Combinations Continued

Continuing on from yesterday, the next time we met we did blue and orange. It is recommended that you use more blue than orange in a combination to make it pleasing. I had to try it both ways though. I don't think I want to make many more in this combination so maybe they will have alternating blocks of some chain type pattern.
The third session was red and green. Trying to not make it say Christmas was my goal. The purple, green, orange was another combination, maybe a triad, with a very soft orange, very strong fuchsia purple and 2 shades of green, one so dark it was almost black.
I still have a lot of triangles and squares already cut and sorted in these tiny drawer units.
I have already pieced some blues and greens in a more random fashion to use up these leftovers.