I get this question so often: how do you make a scrap quilt look good? There isn't once answer to this question, but I'm going to give you a few guidelines to help you out.
Remember that these are my thoughts - they aren't rules and you can do whatever you want. These are guidelines that I roughly use to pick fabrics for scrap quilts and I break them all of the time.
As soon as I knew that this design for the Freya Quilt would be a pattern, I knew I wanted to make a scrappy version. As you know, my scrap situation has been out of control and I had a bucket full of leftover binding strips and jelly roll remnants that were perfect for this quilt.
Since I tend to use darker colors to bind my quilts, this quilt ended up with quite a bit of navy, black, and dark gray and I love how the dark values play with the bright colors.
One of my favorite things to do with a pattern, is to turn it into a scrap quilt. It doesn't work for all patterns but most block-based quilts can be made scrappy.
So how do you do this? First, you need to figure out what you need to do to make a single block. Many patterns (including many of my block-based patterns) have this information included. It is useful for making a test block, but it also helps you break the quilt down into units for making the quilt scrappy.
Look at the quilt, figure out how many blocks you need to make, and that will help you determine how many scraps you need. Just multiple the requirements for a single block by the number of blocks to figure how many pieces you need.
I will give you a few examples.
I'm sorry I have been neglecting the Scrap Happy February posts - I had some stuff come up this past week that required all of my attention. But now I'm back at it!
Today I am talking about scrap patterns. There are soooo many scrap options out there and it would be pretty much impossible to cover them all so I am going to have two posts for you: one with patterns that are specifically intended to be used with scraps and one discussing how to use scraps for (just about) any quilt pattern.
When you are cutting scraps down into uniform pieces, it can be very helpful to already have some patterns in mind for future projects. I will usually cut down some common sizes (2.5" squares for example) and then I put a post-it note with other sizes on my cutting table so I can be prepared for future patterns.
Imagine you have just finished cutting fabric for a new project. You have a nice, neat stack of cut fabric shapes and then you have . . . everything else. Are they scraps? Do they go back in the stash? Are they something else?
There is no answer here - it is 100% up to you how you want to handle leftover fabric, but I am going to walk you through how I handle this situation and hopefully that might help you a little bit.
Now that we have made it to February (phew!) and our New Year's Resolutions are either starting to become habit or have been long forgotten (ha!), I thought it would be fun to spend some time in February working on my scraps and share that process with all of you.
If you are like me, scraps seem to accumulate with alarming speed and the bins begin to overflow and become overwhelming. Last year, I spent some time organizing my scraps, cutting them down into uniform sizes, and putting them into storage so that they were easily accessible and usable. Of course, I made more than 50 quilts last year so you can imagine that I have a few more scraps and I need to go through this process again.
Hi, my name is Erica and I love to make quilts! Click the photo to read a little more about me and how I started my quilting journey.
