ScrapHappy February 2023

I am thrilled to have a finish for this ScrapHappy Day!  I started this quilt last year.

The Scraps Escape, based on a design from Kelly Young’s book, Stash Statement.

I did this quilt Quilt-As-You-Go, with a central rectangle, and four skinny panels.  I quilted the center with straight lines to outline the patches, and I did the first skinny panel with a sort of wood-grain look.  But then I got distracted and left it in a basket for months.

The back, showing the skinny blue panels around the center rectangle.

By the time I got back to it, I wasn’t that enamored of the wood grain, because it was really hard to make transitions from area to area.  I tried different designs, and ended up with a sort of angular petal design that worked for me.

After stitching the four skinny panels, I realized I was going to want a thin border of gray around the scrappy center, so that the parallelograms didn’t touch the center; I wanted them to look like they were flying away.  Adding a little gray border was simple, but I should have quilted it too; in the finished quilt it just looks poufy.

The different quilting designs are evident. I like the one on the bottom panel the best.

And putting the whole thing together was no picnic.  There are different ways you can join the quilted sections into one big quilt.  I am not going to go into details on my process because it was not a good one!  But it involved LOTS of turning excess fabric out of the way temporarily, trimming, pressing, top stitching, and trying to figure out what to do where corners met up.  I had a hard time getting the batting sections to match up perfectly, and I can definitely feel where small areas of batting are either joined up double-thickness or missing entirely.  

Right now I have a few other works-in-progress, where the tops are still in sections.  If I had really liked this QAYG technique, I would have opted to complete those the same way, but it turns out that for me, the traditional way is easier.

But this quilt was intended just for me, so I had the freedom to experiment with all kinds of threads, stitch patterns, and QAYG techniques, and I am glad I worked on it.  I really love the way it looks.

ScrapHappy Day is the 15th of each month, when various artists and craftspeople celebrate scraps. It is hosted by Kate and Gun, the first two names listed below.  Even when I don’t have a scrappy project to post myself, I love to click around and see what the other Scrapsters have been up to each month!

 
 
 

 

Category : Craft Projects, Quilting
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