Scrappy baby quilt

    After you have made a number of quilts, the left over scraps of fabric start to pile up. I usually put all the ones from a quilt together in a zip lock baggie in case I want to make something else out of them. 

Some of the quilted bags I have made, were created from these remnants.

I found another solution to all these scraps! Use them in a 'scrappy' quilt top!

I got this idea from a book called " Start with Scraps" by Carol E Loessel  (Publisher: House of White Birch).

Take all the little pieces and start sewing them together every which way.  Cut a few of them into triangles too and sew them in just to make the thing look interesting. It avoids too many right angles, like the one below. (Although there's really nothing wrong with right angles!)

Then you have to decide what kind of blocks you want to make with your scrappy squares. Personally I like flying geese blocks, (they are easy and rather fun to make , plus they turn out quite well).One of my other favorites is sawtooth stars which use 4 flying geese blocks in the making.

I cut 4 1/2 inch strips out of my 'scrappy fabric' and then cut that into 4 1/2 inch squares. I cut tan rectangles (4 1/2 " x 2 1/2 ") to use and I already had a whole stack of 2 1/2 " tan squares from another project, (my daughter's wedding quilt) which didn't get used. Then I also cut some 2  1/2 " squares out of some blue animal ark fabric leftovers to make the flying geese blocks (which become the star points).

The blue animal ark fabric had previously been fussy cut (some of the pictures were cut out of it for a different quilt) so there were holes here and there, but there was still quite a bit left. After examining it, I saw that I could easily fussy cut 8 or 9 squares, 5 1/2 inches in size. I knew the sawtooth star blocks would be bigger than that, but I had green strips of fabric leftover to add to as sashing around them and also a nice chunk of the same green to cut more strips, as needed. Perfect, I thought to myself!

I measured the width of the leftover green strips of fabric and after doing the math, I thought they would be perfect to use as sashing to increase the size of the blue ark squares to be the same as the scrappy star blocks.  

After  sewing the strips on and measuring the blue ark blocks, I realized I had not made the strips wide enough after all!  In my calculations, I had forgotten to take into account the 1/4 inch seam allowance on the blue ark block itself so... back to the drawing board.  Seam ripper time! Good thing I had only made 2 blocks.... Less to take apart. 

Luckily I still had a chunk of the same green fabric left over from my last baby quilt !

I ended up cutting a bunch of 2 inch wide strips this time and sewing them onto the blue arks which did the trick!

I made 8 sawtooth star blocks and 8 ark blocks which I arrange on the floor in a number of ways until I was satisfied with how it looked.  

Then I proceeded to sew the block rows together, after evicting one of the cats from the craft/ computer room for distracting me. ( I had sewn the wrong sides of the first 2 blocks together so the ark would have been upside down! ) Sigh! More seam ripping....

Once all 16 blocks were sewn together the quilt top measured 32" X 32". I decided it needed a little border around the outside to finish it off so I used the discarded green strips from my first attempt at sashing the little blue arks. Here is the finished little top, 34" x 34".

I'm debating about maybe putting another wider border around it out of the bubble fabric (in a few of the star blocks), but then it might start to get too big for a baby quilt. Plus I would be using a new piece of fabric.  (My goal was to make the whole thing out of scraps.) So for now, it stays like this. I have no idea what I'll use for the back fabric yet. I have no one in mind for this quilt yet either, so there's no rush. 

And I have so much "scrappy fabric" left over that I'm starting to plan another quilt to use some more of it up. I got another idea from one of the patterns in this book, but again, I'm going to adapt it to my own needs.

But first, I will have to machine quilt my little pinned together, blue and green panda baby quilt  (made and 'sandwiched' in September) to free up some of my quilt pins in order to pin together my newly completed back and white, half and half blocks Christmas quilt (in the last post). See how one thing naturally leads into another?  After those 2 are quilted, I will take another stab at a scrappy quilt. I'm starting to like them a lot!