One thing leads to another when you start playing with quilt design. I think this is especially true when making do. The first quilt here is one made from a bag of salesmen sample fabric pieces from the Valley Quilt Guild. I like to use every inch of fabric provided, which was the 30's prints and some backing flannel. So I decided to cut the pieces 6 1/2" x 12 1/2", and even piece a few as needed--the samples were a irregular in length, though they were the same width. Then I went to my box of old solid scraps, used up a few (yeay!), and added a 3 1/2"x 6 1/2" piece to each end of the rectangles. With a little math ahead of time, I figured this would all come out fairly close to a throw size. 30 blocks, 18"x6" finished, laid out 3x10--and here we have a 54"x60" quilt. I added a scrap of flannel I had from back trimmings, and added a racing stripe to make the donated lavendar flannel big enough for the back. And it was all finished with binding scraps. Win-Win-Win--I used all of the donated fabric, used up some of my scraps, and have a new design idea.
So I took this design idea, and used it with my 5"x9" slices. The idea here was that I wanted to make a quilt top to fit a piece of guild batting that was leftover--how frugal can you get? Here I have 30 5"x9", and I cut 20 5"x9" down to a total of 60 3"x9" of a different color. Same plan, adding the little pieces to the ends and sewing these blocks into the same 3x10 layout, so it finished 41"x45". I like the effect of what looks like 4 patches going down in columns. It was fun and fast again, and I used up some 5"x9" slices, and some Grandma Pam back and binding fabric--and the leftover piece of batting, of course.
So what's next?--let me see how this design works using 10" squares or Fat Quarters......
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