SOCIAL MEDIA

Saturday, October 16, 2021

Scrappy Hearts

First off, I've been working on lots of quilts this year.  I've finished several tops recently. Finished a few whole quilts including backing and binding.  The stack above is all my finished quilts from the last several months.  They are all baby or lap sized.  These were the easy finishes.  Most of them can be found on my quilt gallery page.

This stack here, nestled in amongst all my office supplies, still needs finishing.  These are the bigger quilts.  Eleven in all.  In there is also my La Passacaglia that I finally finished this year (only took 6 years).  

One of the quilts I'm working on now is my scrappy hearts quilt.  I was intrigued by Youtube videos of "making your own fabric" with scraps.  I have so many scraps that my bins were spilling everywhere.  

The thing I find most curious with scraps is how slow they go down when you start working with them.  I've made loads of "fabric sheets" and still my scrap bins seem to be at the same level as when I started.  I just randomly sew together any and every bit of scraps, no rhyme or reason to it.  I love doing it when I need to destress and get my mind off of something.  

I'm using all low volume fabrics for the background.  I didn't want to make the whole quilt with heart blocks just because I was getting bored of making them so I decided to use low volume 9 patches in-between.  Who knows I may change my mind about these 9 patches but I do like the all over scrappiness and think it will look really cool once I get all the blocks together.  Buuutt looking at it through the photo it almost seems too much and detracts from the hearts.  We'll see where it goes.  

I'm making 21 heart blocks and the same number of 9 patches.  Each block is 12" finished.  The overall quilt should measure about 72" x 84".  I don't have any plans for it yet - just enjoying the process.

I'm debating if I should add some dark stitches to the edge of the heart like I did here.  Some of the blocks ended up having lighter fabrics on the edges so I thought this would help distinguish the edges a little better.  Or maybe doing the darker stitches on the outside of the heart instead once all the layers are together and I'm doing the final quilting.  Either way I feel like this quilt should have some pretty dense quilting.  This sort of sums up my quilting process...start with and idea, work on it, ponder it, work on it, change it, decide to live with it,  eventually we get there.