Happy Scrappy Houses Quilt Top Finished!

The House quilt top is finished. Took a bit longer than anticipated as I made it very scrappy indeed and underestimated the amount of time it would take to cut the scraps to the required size. But what a beauty!

This is a free pattern over at Bonnie Hunter's Quiltville site. My quilt comes out at 56in x 67in, a nice size for the sofa. It's one of the older patterns that I did see when I first started quilting and recently re-discovered. Definitely is a pattern that 'eats' up a lot of scraps, but will take some time to cut out and put together. In Bonnie's version the sashings are in one colour, however I quite liked the idea to make it a little bit more colourful as I already had decided on that blue border thinking that this would give it a nice, cheery contrast.

The blue border...I have had this fabric for at least 10 years! All it says on the selvage is David Textiles. Had about 2m of this, saving it for something special.

The photo really does not do it justice. It is just beautiful and I knew straight away that this was it. Funny how you just know sometimes exactly what you want to use for a particular quilt.

I had a bit of fun with this quilt, putting all sorts of characters in the windows for a bit of amusement.

The sloth, my absolute favorite

The hippo timidly looking out of the window

The piglets

The little chicks

...and many others, but I won't bore you to tears. Bit more work in terms of cutting them out, but brings a smile to my face every time I look at them. So darn cute!

I am planning to piece a backing together using some of the bigger scraps and some ugly fabrics. I did this last year for a small quilt and really enjoyed the process...like putting a jigsaw puzzle together and looks fantastic (remains to be seen for this quilt in terms of mixing in some uglies). I am determined to make this quilt entirely out of scraps and unwanted fabric.

In terms of quilting, I am thinking of doing an E2E design, however this will have to wait until I have my stationary longarm again (due to what's happening in the world, there seems to be a delay and I have no idea when I will get the new machine). The way this is going, I will have a lot of quilt tops to quilt once the machine arrives.

Next on the list is another pattern that I want to put together or maybe another fox quilt or maybe that irregular grid design...I have so many projects on my list!

Linking up to Off The Wall Fridays hosted by Nina Marie over at Creations...Quilts, Art...Whatever

Karin

Testing Times

More and more restrictions in place across Australia.

I spent most of the weekend watching the news and quilting. Finally got around to something I had been wanting to do for a long time...and that is, sewing my batting leftovers together. I did chuck a lot lot out about 2 months ago, but again have quite a selection of leftovers. I seem to keep everything!

I could use batting tape which I have used before, however that would be a bit expensive. This is only to be used for the many practice sandwiches that I do. Just to give you an idea of how much batting  is leftover from one quilt

This is about 28in square and is from the overage of the Traffic Jam quilt that I just finished. I use a three step zigzag stitch for this, but you could also just use a simple zigzag stitch. I have used this to piece together batting pieces for a quilt before and it presents absolutely no problems when quilting.

So, I spent the entire evening just rattling down batting pieces and have a whole stack of them ready to go.

I will do this from now on with all the leftovers rather than using fresh batting for the practice sandwiches. Way too much wastage going on.

Today then I continued on the Scrappy Houses quilt (see that empty space..this is where the new machine is supposed to go...still no word!)

Decided to take the scrappiness to the next level by also making the sashings all out of different fabric. A bit more work intensive but I am hoping to really reduce the stash of accumulated fabric cut offs as much as I can.

This is how far I got

I am not matching or coordinating colours because that would probably drive me insane and, of course, had a red cornerstone together with a red sashing. Very annoying but I will just leave that and sew them together as they come through the machine. Otherwise this project will become too time consuming. This is just meant as a throw for our sofas, so it will do. Planning on a very pretty dark blue border and then it will be done.

Linking up to Oh Scrap! over at Quilting is more fun than Housework to show off my progress and have a look around at what other quilters are up to.

Karin

Scrap Project Continued

OK, so maybe this is not the fastest way of getting rid of some scraps!

I have been working pretty solidly on this project

Decided to make 20 blocks, set in a rows of 4 x 5 blocks. The whole room has been taken over by this project. This is actually the space where the new machine will sit, once it finally arrives in Australia (getting slightly impatient now!)

Anyway, completed my 20 blocks and today finally started working on the surrounds and sashings.

Had to do a few alterations...the colour arrangement in one of the blocks did not work, so I changed that and then got going on the surrounds. Bit of a hold up there as well as I kept muddling up my cut out diagonals, however finally got there. This should now advance a bit quicker. Actually, the most time consuming part (which I had not considered, of course) is the cutting of the pieces. While I have lots of scraps lying around, the cutting of the individual components does take a fair amount of time. While I had myself sorted for the house construction, today I had to put in some time to cut out the surrounds and sashing pieces. With that being mostly done now, this should be plain sailing now and come together relatively quickly.

The quilt will measure about 58in x 69in with a 4 1/2in border. This will look hilariously colourful...I do love scrap quilts and using the last bits of that very special fabric that one finds amongst the scraps is so satisfying. There is some fabric in here that I have had for at least 10 years, if not longer...

Also, today, I got my parcel from the Fatquartershop in record time. I ordered on the 15/2...what a fantastic service!

I had a very large gift voucher and decided to spent it all in one hit given the postage. This took me days to go through the shop and select items, but wow, can this girl shop or what...I did pack a lot in there and picked up a fair few specials. That white fabric you see on the right is  Swiss Dots One Yard 'Grab a Bag' deal. As I do use a lot of dottie fabric I was hoping for something that I could use as background...really happy with the neutral tan dots on white fabric that I received...perfect! Apart from that, got a Kona solids fat quarter bundle and some more fabric carefully selected for the next few projects. And yes, a little Fat Eights bundle of Elizabeth Hartman fabric because it was on special and a few other bitses and pieces.
I love getting parcels! Bit of an irony here though as I have been saying over the last few weeks that I am drowning in fabric. My scrap quilt will definitely not make room for all of that 😂

Karin