Scrappy quilt

In the middle of the summer my middle daughter decided she wanted to start quilting.  Actually, I had started to sew a few strips together and she kind of took the project over.  Her quilt is still in process and I quite look forward to seeing the end result.

While she occupied my sewing machine for hours at end I was left to twiddle my thumbs.  At a loss of things to do in my sewing room I began to organize scraps.  What a great idea you say!  Well, yes and no!

I wasn't really prepared for how long that venture would take.  You see, my daughters have been playing with my scraps since they were in diapers.  Considering one of them becomes a teenager in April, that is a considerable amount of time!  Other than a few ziploc bags of leftover cut materials, the summation of my scrap collection was stuffed into an old milk crock.  Which had been emptied over my sewing room floor and stuffed back on too many occasions to count.

At the start of the process, most fabric needed to be pressed as the pile was a wrinkled and disheveled mess.  After that I started to cut strips at nausea.  I wasn't sure I would ever stop cutting.  Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into a month.  I forced and bribed myself to cut strips.  Each day I would go in, grab a handful and complete it.   I found myself mostly cutting 2 1/2" strips.

As I cut I came up with a plan.  Thinking of how to use all those 2 1/2" strips.  I tossed aside all the dark colours and kept pulling anything bright.  My strategy was to sew 4 strips together and then cut them into another 2 1/2" strip.  I calculated that I needed 224 strips.  I then sewed those into 16 patch blocks.  Using 4 strips of 4 squares.  In the end I landed up with 56 blocks and sewed them together 7 blocks wide x 8 blocks high.

The quilt was with 896 squares!  28 squares x 32 squares.  Quite a feat when they were all cut from random scraps at random lengths.  I had it machine quilted and used up the last bit of a scrap for the binding.  Couldn't be happier!

The result was a quilt that I was thrilled with and landed up being a belated grad gift for my niece.