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Question: What do you do with a pile of light and dark of scraps, a cutting board, iron and paper?

Answer: You make a quilt!

 

                                  











Potential quilt

 I am going to start refurbishing our bedroom … is it Spring that has brought this on I wonder? … and I want to make a different quilt than the one we have had on the bed for years. This one is a ‘Snowball’ design, with strips sewn straight onto the batting and backing, as in quilt-as-you-go.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                Old quilt

Now, is decorating an excuse to make another quilt or is making another quilt an excuse to decorate? In my case, making another quilt is an excuse to use up the bits of fabric overflowing from my storage baskets. I don’t want to buy any new fabrics; I only want to shift some of my existing stock. And there is a load of stock I can tell you!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                    Storage baskets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                         Scraps

 And it will be a long journey so I have to ask myself why I do it, what makes me cut my first strip and sew my first seam? I know it is going to take up a lot of my time and yet I still can’t wait to get started. I suppose it’s because this quilt will be unique to me, no-one else will have an identical one. And it will be fulfilling a need in me to create with fabric, even at this most basic level.  I won’t have to think or design or solve problems; I will just be able to sit down and sew. It will be the equivalent of motorway driving on my sewing machine too: foot down on the carpet and no speed restrictions (!).

IN PREPARATION: I have set up my loft room for a concentrated sewing session. It will be left like this for the duration as no-one else needs this space and the door can be closed after me. I won’t have to clear up at all, just sew. I can spend an hour in there or fifteen minutes whilst the potatoes boil.  Here’s the set-up.

                                         Set-up

1 An iron and pad: positioned away from my machine so I have to get up from my chair each time I need to use it (stops me from sitting in one position all the time and makes me move every few minutes)

2 Cutting board, ruler and cutter: new blade so I don’t get frustrated when cutting.

3 Pad of A4 lined paper: the cheaper the better as the paper tears more easily after sewing.

4 Sewing machine: threaded with neutral cotton thread, stitch size reduced to 1.1 on my setting. (I tried with several qualities of paper and noticed that the better quality ones needed an even smaller stitch.)

5 Bags of strips hanging on the drawer: Light strips in the green bag and dark in the red bag. (They will be easy to swap over when I change from light to dark fabrics.)

6 Bag on the floor for discarded ends of strips that weren’t long enough to go across the page. (Need to offload them onto someone who uses smaller strips.)

7 Rubbish bin placed to the right of the machine.

ALSO IN PREPARATION: I have cut lots of strips from Hoffman-like fabrics (i.e. rich looking fabric with gold or silver in them. I have lots left over from box making days.) I spent an afternoon ironing fabrics first and cutting what I could from them. My thought was to cut strips of varying widths if I could get them from the left-overs of the fabrics: 2”, 1 ¾”, 1 ½” and 1 ¼” and I needed lots of variety to get started.

More next week.

BTW:  All the strips for my granddaughter’s quilt have been joined and now I need space to ponder on how I am going to proceed around the borders with what remains of the light fabric. More on this quilt in a couple of weeks.