Basting Begun

An update on the quilt I tried to baste last week.

This quilt was born because I fell in love with a fabric line and had to use it right away! At the time I bought a layer cake (set of 10" squares) and that is what I used for the body of the quilt (plus a lot of my own stash in suitable colours and tones).

Even after I finish a quilt top, my eyes are still caught by fabric that would have been good in it, or, in this case, caught by a mini charm pack of the same fabric line. ("Charms" are 5" squares; "Mini charms" are 2.5" squares. This pack contained 42 squares from the fabric line.) Even though the top was assembled and I had no use for them, I couldn't resist buying this mini charm pack. I obviously was not over this fabric line. (And the mini charms are so cute and only a few dollars. Very hard to resist.)

This charm pack has been hanging around in the room I use for sewing ever since, which is at least a few years. I don't have a set place to store fabric pre-cut packs because I don't tend to buy a lot of them. And I didn't want to break up the set and put the squares with my scraps. So the neat little bundle moved from surface to surface as it needed to be moved out of the way. Repeatedly getting my attention but it was never the time to use them.

Until.

Until I needed just a few inches more width on my quilt back! Sewing them together in one long strip and inserting them as a stripe might just add the width that I needed.

I decided to piece them alternating light and dark.

I did it in sections instead of one long strip because it's very easy to have a long strip warp or curve on you. So they were pieced into 8" and 10" sections and then I added a solid border on each side. I had extra of a tannish brown colour that worked well. (I bought it online for my Lucy Boston but it really wasn't the right shade. I had just enough for what I had in mind here!)

I put 2" (finished) on each side and the top and bottom.

I didn't have enough of the brown for the full height of the backing so I added strips on the top and bottom. I looked through my scrap bags, and found leftover pieces from making the top, including more fabric from the same fabric line.

With this extra 6" in width, the backing was just wide enough:

I laid the top on top of the backing and the backing is 2-3" wider than the top. Not enough extra to quilt it on a long arm machine, but enough for me to work with on my domestic machine.

Once that was confirmed, I secured the backing to the table (good side down, of course; not like pictured above), covered it with the batting and then the top. The batting was also just large enough. I buy queen size battings and usually have a comfortable excess on the width and plenty of extra on the height. Not in this case but it was enough.

Then then pinning started.

And continued and continued. I had two and a half hours to do all this (including a final pressing of the top and steaming the batting, which I have not shown) and that was not enough time. As my departure time approached, I was able to confirm that the room wouldn't be needed by anyone else in the next week so I left the quilt set up on the tables and will continue--and hopefully finish--next week.

Also, I need to buy another pack of pins because I have enough for the center but not the borders. That will mean I have 900. Surely that is enough?

New Project: Nine Patch in Reds

I've been reading more quilting blogs that use scraps and taking note of the way they organize their scraps and keep them ready to use.

One thing a lot of people do is cut them to set sizes. That way your pieces are ready to use and manageable and basically you make yourself some precuts.

Recently, I took a bunch of my scraps that weren't in big enough chunks to use for much else and cut them into 1.5", 2" and 2.5" strips. There are lots of patterns to show how to use strips to make all sorts of quilt designs.

And smaller pieces, I cut into 2.5" squares. Here a few leftover from the Nocturne Star quilt (which was made from a lot of leftovers itself):

I've also picked up a few mini charm packs (also known as "candy"):

Mini charms (or "candy") are 2.5" squares.
Charm packs are 5" squares, hence the mini-charm.

They are hard to resist at only $4-$5 each. (I bought the first one (top right) because I thought it might be helpful in my Farm Girl Vintage quilt but I never ended up using it. But once I had one, others were quick to follow.) They give a good variety of fabric, but all from one fabric line so they will coordinate.

In reading some quilting blogs I saw a nine-patch design that piqued my interest. I can't find it now but it was mostly nine-patches with a larger feature block in the top middle of the quilt. The main point is that it got my mind going and I decided finally to do a "red" quilt.

I have been collecting red fabrics (fat quarters and half yard pieces) since I've been buying quilting fabric. It always catches my eye and I find it hard to resist. I've always had in mind to combine it with other colours and either do some type of wash from light to dark or hold the red constant while running the other colours through the rainbow. Anyway, obviously just a general idea right now.

But I decided to start. So I took out my box of red fabrics and went through them all and cut mini-charms from almost all of them:

They are roughly sorted into light, light-medium, medium-dark, and dark piles. I got seven squares from most of the fabrics. Some I cut double that amount depending how much I liked the fabric or if it was a tone that I thought I needed more of. But there are also true scraps in there where I only had enough fabric for one square. I'm still deciding if I will keep matching fabric together as much as possible or if I will mix them all up.

I will be bringing all of these mini-charm squares with me on a trip and we will see how I start to put them together. That will be all hand sewing since I'll be on the road. But I'm sure I'll sew some of them on the machine as well. (It would make a good "leader and ender" project. That's where you sew pieces for a project like this at the beginning and end of your chain piecing of another project.)

My mind is always churning with these ideas. It's nice to try some of them out!