Monday, April 30, 2012

A Truly Scrappy Rug!

Two years ago I raided my Mom's scrap basket. She keeps it just for me (at least, that's what I tell myself!!) I was lucky to find a nice sized pile of coordinating fabrics already cut up into triangles and squares, I think Mom started something that didn't turn out as she'd hoped, and tossed it into the basket. So, I snagged it up, lugged it over the ocean and threw it into my own scrap basket! 

Every few months I'd go through the basket, pulling out some scraps for some small project, and mull over this particular set, wondering what on earth I could turn it into. No ideas sprang into mind, so back into the basket it went. I only knew that it was destined for something wonderful!

Last Friday the urge to SEW hit me. I didn't want to bother with patterns, too much cutting and measuring, deciding on colors...and it hit me, I knew what to pull out and just sew! And so I did, out came the scrap set, and the machine, and I sat myself down to sew. And slowly, it emerged...and idea that took shape and formed itself into a final beautiful piece of art!

Generally, I HATE sewing triangles, they never work out right for me, but since this scrappy project had no definition or aspirations of perfection, I slowly began sewing the triangles together, each triangle sewn to a different colored fabric. From there I matched them together by color, to form half a diamond, and then added tops to make whole diamonds. 

Once that was done I thought 'It needs to be set off a bit or else there's too much unmatched patterns going on...
So I pulled out a plain piece of silver cloth I had on the shelf, cut some strips and added a border. Originally I had planned to sew the little squares into 9 patches and make coasters out of them, but brilliance struck and they were added to the project to create one more border. Of course, there weren't enough of the 2x2" squares to go around 4 sides, but fortunately there was a small set of 2.5x2.5 squares that fit perfectly along one side.


I tried out a method for layering the quilt using some masking tape on the bottom fabric to tape it to the floor, then laying the batting, then the quilt on top, used my bent safety pins to baste it all together and pulled out my quilting foot feeder for sewing in the ditch. But...I think because the triangles were distorted a bit, the quilt developed a lot of puckers as I went and the quilting didn't turn out as beautiful as it was in my mind.

Once I sewed some straight lines to keep it all together, I switched to my darning foot and some brown thread to do free-motion quilting in the middle of each diamond. Added some binding to the edges and 

Ta-dah! Here it is! A truly scrappy rug!! Perfect for my sewing room which needed a small rug, though I have a strong suspicion this may become a flying carpet for little man since he's been trying to get it from me at each step of the sewing process! 


Friday, April 6, 2012

Scrappy Bits!

Using up scraps in gifts and useful house decor!

Tissue Case Covers...blue one is for a friend's son (Mario Bros), the other two are leftovers from a Robert Kauffman collection [pattern here]


Shoe bag for a friend's son who is going into 1st grade. Mario Bros fabric with dark blue accent.


Scrappy coasters using up more Robert Kauffman leftovers


Wild assortment of scraps sewing randomly into a block, edged with dark brown border and cream colored binding. I've finally figured out the dimensions to cut binding if I want to sew rather than hand-stitch the back.
Cut 2" strips and sew to the edge at 1/4th inch. Works perfectly!


Used Frixion highlighters to draw a free-motion pattern, and quilted with my darning foot. 


 Here it is on the dining room table with my candles.