Quilt No 109
January 2016
A frog pops his head up from behind a rock. He surveys all that he sees. It’s definitely frog-worthy. He's met the challenge - he’s deep in a scrappy forest.
I’m beginning
to suspect that maybe, just maybe, having limits placed on you might make you a
better quilter. Oddly, this same
philosophy applies to child rearing as well. Too many loosey-goosey parameters and the
quilt or child becomes a wild and unruly beast, an annoyance to everyone in its
sphere of influence. But...add a few
limitations and you get just enough latitude to nudge it along to become all
that it can be.
This year’s
annual guild challenge was to make a “scrappy quilt”. This means to take all the leftovers from
other quilts and make a new quilt out of those. To accommodate quilters at all levels
challenges are kept straight forward.
They never involve wild ideas, impossible to achieve technicalities, or
the spending of giant sums of money. Decisions
about size or colour or complexity are left up to each quilter. The fewer the restrictions, the greater the yield
of quilts. The challenge is not so much
about following the rules as it is about making the theme your own.
When the scrappy
quilt challenge was announced everyone turned to look at their seat mate and
nodded their heads approvingly.
Yep. Everyone had at least a
refrigerator-sized pile of fabric scraps they could plunge into. Ultimately, some people dove into their pile
so many times that they made three or four quilts. In a few cases, previously undiscovered
nieces and nephews got new quilts from an aunt they’d never heard of.
I couldn’t
wait to make the challenge my own.
Two
weekends after the announcement of the challenge I was at the cottage. This is a place that is on a lake in the bush
(we don’t use the word “forest” in Northern Ontario). I go there with my sewing machine and a large
box of fabric every weekend. I also cart
along a lot of other things of lesser importance, like food and water. I’ve forgotten various components of these over
the years but I’ve never forgotten my sewing machine. I’ve never even forgotten my sewing machine cord
– a common rookie error among quilting workshop attendees. One memorable weekend I forgot the quilt I was
working on. I just started on another one
with what I found in the box, and came up with the tiny quilt, Looking for Atlantis. I decided to do a repeat performance for the scrappy
quilt.
My plan evolved. I would make my scrap fabric quilt exclusively out of the fabrics I found
in the box. Generally, I have a couple
of quilts on the go. For every fabric I
use in a quilt, a dozen different fabrics may be “auditioned” before I select
the final piece, so there’s always a wide variety of fabric battling for space in
the box. Fortunately, I only need small
pieces for my quilts, so I can make do with a single largish box.
I had tried
to tame the bits and pieces in the box using two bags for scraps. One had ordinary scraps and the other had
scraps that had some sort of fusible material already ironed onto the back. Fusibles allow you to iron pieces of fabric
directly onto the quilt top. All of the
scraps were relatively small and irregular in shape, mere shards left from one
quilt or another. Only the tail ends of
quilt binding strips had any straight edges. I narrowed my challenge even further and vowed
to make my scrappy quilt top using only the scraps in those two bags. There!
I’d made the challenge my own.
 |
| Here are a few items from the scrap bags. |
As much as
possible I let the scraps dictate the composition. Leftover appliqué trees that didn’t make it
into a previous quilt were used. The longer horizontal strips near the top of
the quilt suggested the curvy lines of forested hills, so I used those just the
way I found them. When I began working
on the border I found I was short of fabric. I ultimately had to stray outside
of the two bags from the cottage box and add in some pieces from another box of
scraps at home. It wasn’t really
cheating, since they were still scraps.
And when you set the limits yourself, you’re allowed to alter them. I came up with that rule myself. It’s the spirit
of the limits that count.
When all
the scraps had coalesced their cosmic dust into the universe of a new quilt, the
stars from Lost on the Ocean had
found a new home. The trees from Reach for the Stars were rediscovered,
and the flowers from Horse with No Name
had moved out of the desert/ocean and taken root near a swamp. The frog near
the rocks had recovered from being passed over for a previous post card quilt.
Surprisingly,
the multiple layers of fused fabric I used in this quilt kept it nice and flat,
suggesting that I had previously been under utilizing stabilizers. Who knew? By doing most of the decorative and raw edge
appliqué stitching only on the quilt top everything stayed smooth. No dreaded ripples took hold after I added the
batting and backing and did the machine quilting.
And, best of all, the abandoned quilt scraps settled down happily into
their new life deep in their own forest.
They would never be mere scraps again.
