My Scrap Quilting Obsession

Guess what I've been doing?


While cleaning up my studio (which is an ongoing project) I realized I have so very much fabric. A lot of it I was saving for indeterminate reasons. Scrap fabric that Michelle gave me, extra fabric from curtains, old pajamas - I really needed a project to start helping me get rid of all this.

Obviously I should do a scrap quilt! I needed something that would be able to combine a lot of different colors so I could use lots of stuff up. And I wanted to do something that uses 4 inch squares, since I had a few charm packs of those sitting around from forever ago.

So, I got started on washing and cutting the saved fabric into 4 inch squares and looking for a pattern. And I found tons of great patterns, like ticker tape quilts:

but they use different sized squares, and holy crap the actual quilting part is intimidating.

So, I kept cutting my squares while watching tv and researching. I couldn't do anything with strips either, since I'd already pre-cut 4 inch squares (note to self: In the future, determine type of quilt you're going to make before just cutting the pieces, whoops). I finally found this quilt on etsy that gave me an idea for the pattern:

That's Quiltville's "A Trip to Central Park Toddler Quilt". There were squares! Even if there was cutting involved! And, you could use lots of different weird patterns! Hooray!

So I got busy, and so far I've made 15 squares of the quilt. I imagine it will take something like 40 to make a lap quilt or so? I'm not entirely sure, but I'm enjoying it.

Here's my favorite square so far:


Check the pictures on flickr for tons of notes about where the fabrics come from.