Repairs and Practical Quilts

I have done many, many crafty and creative things over the years. Many were purely decorative, some were useful, some were fun to do, and some ended up just plain tacky!

Quilting has allowed me to be creative, productive AND make something that most people consider functional and decorative.

One of the first quilts I made was a King size duvet cover for our bed. Here was a chance to display some of my handiwork in a very useful manner. Satisfying!

After 10 years of use, it was showing some fatigue.

So repairs happened, adding some new detail and more life to this quilt.

But, it was also no longer the decorative statement I wanted in my bedroom anymore.  Our new house is colder than our old apartment, so I decided to keep the duvet and put another fresher quilt on top. For anybody who has made a king size quilt, including overhang down the sides and end of the bed, it takes a LOT of fabric.  Now, I love nice fabric as much as any fabric lover, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around spending $18-$20 per metre for6-8 metres of plain white fabric.  So I went down to the store and bought a 100% cotton king size white flat sheet and cut it up.  Way cheaper!  Adding smaller bits of different fabrics in my planned colour scheme, I arrived at this.

And then I made 9 more:)

I used a warm, thin flannel as a batting and used another king size flat sheet for the back.  Quilting this on my trusty Janome regular size sewing machine meant planning stitching that didn’t have to be rotated much as this quilt was pretty heavy.  Long wavy horizontal lines worked. Voila!

And a few coordinating pillows to finish the look on the bed.

 

scrap happy rainbow quilts

Hello. Thanks for checking out my blog. I hope you enjoy following me on my journey playing with colour and quilts.

A friend suggested sorting scraps by colour order to make them more approachable. I seem to end up sorting by rainbow order.

Now to put them together. One of my favourite ways to piece scraps is by making crazy squares. Quickly them came together into 12″ blocks.

I decided that I needed smaller pieces to achieve the flow I was planning, so cut all the blocks into 4.

More small blocks seemed to help and this is the layout I ended up with.

Now to piece all the blocks together.  I decided to quilt in a giant spiral to emphasize the blend from one colour to the next.

This quilt is backed in thick fleece, without batting.  I have found that no batting is needed as a heavy fleece adds the desired thickness.

I hope this inspires you to pick up some of your scraps and use them up. Especially since that is how quilting came to be.