Scrap Quilt

I have started sewing the scrap quilt, and wanted to show you what I am doing.

That's all the progress so far.  I've called it Scrap Vortex but I'm not really following along with the directions.  The way I am making it is to cut all the scraps on the dining table into rectangles.  Now I am sewing them together by size.  While I am trying to balance lights and darks, it is only the size of the piece that determines where it will be placed.  Since these are rectangles, I do get to decide which side of the piece the new piece will be.

This methodology worries me a bit, since my favorite pieces are likely to be smaller, and the bigger pieces are likely to be the ones I have decided I am done with, although I did make sure I put bigger pieces I liked in the box too.

I figure that if I don't like how it is coming together, I can add bigger pieces that I like, or applique and embroidery on the bigger pieces that I consider to be ugly.

The plan is to use this quilt as a Leaders and Enders project, but it does take more time than mindless piecing since I have to find the right size piece to add.

I do like how it is coming together though. It seems very calm compared to the 365 quilt, which is a good thing.

Do you remember when I showed you my progress on the 365 Quilt last week?  Look at the seventh block from the left in the last row. It wasn't until I posted it that I noticed that the orange ribbon is upside down.  It surprised me that it took almost three weeks to notice that. I noticed it as I was about to press the publish button for that post. I decided not to fix it, because it is a rule breaking quilt. 

Then someone commented on the post and I looked at the post again to make sure I knew which post she was referring to.  It wasn't until then that I noticed that the off center circle was on the bottom left instead of the top right like I was planning to place it.  I took a closer look at that row and the glasses are also upside down. The sunrise/sunset circle and flower vase are correctly placed. 

What happened is when I added the third week to the previous two weeks, I knew I wanted to add to the red block.  But apparently there was red on either end of this piece and on the way to the sewing machine, the quilt decided it had other ideas and third week's blocks got added to the wrong red block.

Apparently, I broke more rules on the left side of the quilt than I knew! Yes, they are staying that way.

Too Long To-Do List

It's been a few days since I posted, and although I have been doing quilty things, they didn't seem very post worthy.  I had a large list of things to do, not an official list, but things that I had been planning on doing.

• Quilt leftovers quilt
• quilt rail fence quilt
• clean up sewing area
• prepare scraps for vortex quilt
• catch up on circles
• start 1857 quilt

I have been making progress on much of it, but each one took other steps that slowed it down.


For example, I found a fat quarter that was perfect for the leftovers quilt.   But the leftover quilt is almost exactly the size of a fat quarter, which meant I had to do a little piecing of the backing to quilt it.  Not a big deal, but I hadn't expected that.  It is  now sandwiched and ready for quilting.

It's also snowed several days, so some time has been taken out for snow shoveling, which I also enjoy doing.

Most people did not find a mistake with the balance with the rail fence quilt, but I had already taken a set of blocks out to fix it.  Here's the revised version. Hopefully I didn't do anything to make it worse.  This means I have met my goal for the month for OMG, although I do hope to quilt it this month too.

 I've been working on cleaning the sewing area / dining table, which mostly means trimming up scraps into rectangles. There are a lot of pieces that aren't rectangles because of all the improv and applique I have been doing lately, but I started a nice stack and the dining table looks much nicer. I just have to trim the rest of the scraps and put away the bigger pieces in the storage area.

I have bought,  washed, dried and ironed the fabric for the 1857 quilt.

I was trying to focus on cleaning the area before working on anything new, such as the 1857 quilt or the circles, as a way to motivate the cleaning, but it seems to backfire.  Do you know what happens when you don't make the circle for the day?  There are two, not one circle to make the next day.  They keep adding on, making it harder and harder to catch up.  Even though I enjoy making the circles, this fact makes me lose my motivation.  My 100th day is coming up on Tuesday, and my goal was to have a post entitled "100 Circles in 100 Days."  I need to make lots of catch up circles so that post can happen.

Linked to:
Amanda Jean at Crazy Mom Quilts