I bought Sunday Morning Quilts when I was at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham last year (going again this weekend, stay tuned for a post!). The book, authord by Jean Nyberg of Crazy Mom Quilts and Cheryl Arkinson of Dining Room Empire, is all about scrappy quilting projects. I looked through it shortly after I got it and then set it aside and mostly forgot about it for the next few months.
A couple of months ago I had another look through and decided to make the Quilted Storage Box project, which uses scraps to create boxes for storing scraps. This seemed a logical first step (they thought so too, which is why they put it at the front of the book), since my scraps were a bit all over the place. I really enjoyed making the scrappy surfaces for this, but the truth was that it turned into a really time-consuming and kind of tedious project. That said, the boxes turned out beautiful and I am quite pleased with them, though I made the mistake of not inserting cardboard to the sides, thinking they would be thick enough to retain their shapes having added extra-thick interfacing; instead, they’re quite squashy, but I’m willing to live with it for now. (Amusingly, by the time I’d finished making them, I no longer had many scraps left to put in them.)
Scrappy storage boxes, Sunday Morning Quilts
Having completed that project, I then took a closer look at the projects in the book and just fell in love with the Missing U quilt. With the exception of incorporating a single white scrap, it uses the same block assembly technique that the scrap boxes used, which is just to sew scrap to scrap until you get a 15.5” square. I ended up making four blocks, in purple, green, light blue, and red. I didn’t have enough scraps of the other rainbow colours to make more slabs, but decided to wait for the scraps build up rather than cutting into fabric from my stash.
Missing U quilt blocks, Sunday Morning Quilts
Since I was working on a couple of other quilts at the time, one of which was a priority as it had a deadline, I’d not gone back to making more blocks, until I saw a post by Cheryl, asking for Missing U block donations for a quilting drive to benefit victims of severe flooding in southern Alberta. I debated whether to just package up the blocks I’d made and send them in or whether to make new ones, and decided to go for new. Many of the scraps I’d used in my blocks had a bit of meaning to me, having come from my first forays into quilting, and since I’m making the quilt for someone special, it felt like it added an extra dimension to the quilt. I didn’t have quite enough scraps to make new blocks for the quilting drive, so I did cut into a bunch of fabric that had been given to me, of which I had plenty and to which I was not particularly attached. I managed to make four slabs before my trip to Toronto in July, and another one while there by raiding my mom’s stash.
Having cut into fabric to make these blocks, it occured to me that I don’t need to wait for the scraps to accumulate for the special quilt I’m making, and that I have plenty of fabric I can cut into without even making a dent in the stash, so this may mean the quilt will be ready sometime in this century.
Addendum 1. I’ve decided I can’t live with the wonky, squashy boxes and have been adding the cardboard to bolster them up. Massive difference.
Not squashy, squashy.
Addendum 2. Cheryl managed to collect 1,630 slabs. That’s ONE THOUSAND, SIX HUNDRED AND THIRTY, people! Well done!
Addendum 3. Most of the photos I’ve taken since 2010 have been with the iPhone. I realize that the photo quality of iPhone pics is pretty fantastic if you want to look at your photos on your phone, but pretty awful under any other condition. I’m starting to take photos with my DSLR, but most of what I’ve made over the past couple of years has fallen victim to the iPhone, so apologies in advance for the shoddy photos I might upload initially.
Pingback: Friday Favourites | Quilting Rainbows
Pingback: City Sampler Sew-Along | Quilting Rainbows
Pingback: The war on scraps: Missing U