August One Monthly Goal - Playing With Scraps

My goal for August was to "do something" with my scraps from last month's twister table runner.  I had lots of squarish pieces, that weren't on the straight grain or true bias, some very thin short strings, some skewiff brown triangles and a few pieces of the border fabric.

I had a vague idea of making a mini quilt with four patches, using those brown bits for sashings, the skinny strings for corner stones and the border scraps for a border.  Let's see how I went.

I pieced my four patches.  As they were odd sizes and many had nicks into them I just found two straight edges and sewed them together, pressed them open and then straightened up the edges and sewed them into the four patch.  Then I worked out how big I could make them and trimmed them all down to the same size.  

By using that method my four patches worked out a lot bigger than I had originally thought they would.  Hence, my brown scraps weren't big enough to make sashings.  Back to the drawing board.......

 If I made four panels  from my four patches I had enough of the border fabric to line up against sides, but it looked a bit bland.  It needed a bit of that brown.  I had one skinny string that ranged from just over an inch wide to quite a bit less.  I also had a wider scrap.  I was able to cut two strings to the length of the panels and then, by cutting and joining, two more inch wide strips the length of the panels.

Ta da!  Rather than try to make a nice neat half inch border I made a little peeper.  It worked well.  

Now what?  There was next to no fabric left.  I started to see place mats.  This is the fabric I used as the backing of the runner and I had a decent sized piece left over. (There is more in stash, as I bought the end of a bolt many years ago, but we are using scraps, right.)

I just put a centre panel in, but I wasn't that excited by it.  I wondered what else I could create.  A fabric basket?  A zippy purse?  I let then sit for a couple of days, while I pondered.  In the end, laziness won out and I decided to proceed with place mats.

Now for the backing.  Hopefully there would be enough of the purple.  Don't you hate that!  One tiny corner was missing!  Oh well, easily fixed, just split it and add the remaining strip of border fabric, but as you can see, it wasn't long enough.  

Fortunately, there was one more funny shaped scrap that I could cut a piece out of and join it to the strip.

Now to get ready to quilt.  I found a strip cut off the edge of a previous quilt that with some joining would do the trick.

There we go. Ready to quilt........I was sitting at the machine ready to start when I had a "Duh" moment.  I'm not doing a binding, as I have no fabric left. Duh!

That's better.

Now to do the quilting.  I have done a free motion quilting course, but am not confident enough to try it on anything yet, so walking foot it is.  I decided to try something other than straight lines.  My initial thought was to do some cross hatching on the four patches, but the top and bottom squares aren't quite square from sewing the edge seams, so I decided to do some orange peels.  I was working away on them when Mick came in and I commented that there is only one word to describe my quilting.  Quick as a wink he came back with "Rough"!  Well, that wasn't quite the word I was going to use, but if you were to be brutally honest, it was probably appropriate.  My description was going to be "Organic".  Then I did some random wavy lines in the purple panel.  Yes, a bit rough and ready, but I can live with it.

Now, if we have place mats, we need coasters.

I just cut two squares of the left over batting and did a quilt as you go with those tiny strings and funny shapes.

Of course, there wasn't a large enough piece for the backing, so that was pieced as well.

Ta da!

And the back.  If you look closely, you can see some of the orange peel quilting in the stripe.  It centred nicely.  That was more good luck than good management, I can assure you.

So what was left from my pile of scraps?  A couple of the larger bits went in the scrap bin, but all those funny little brown bits and and tiny strings went in the garbage.  A good result.

As always, I have other goals in the background.

• Rainbow Scrap Challenge Blocks - tick
• Four Splendid Sampler 2 Blocks - tick - I'll blog it shortly
• Have something completed for One Project a Month - tick
• Complete my crochet shawl - tick - I'll blog it shortly

You have to be happy with that.  A rather productive month for me.  I'll have to decide what to work on next month, but it will be a bit busy, so we'll have to see.

I'm linking up over at Elm Street Quilts.  Pop over and see what other (much more involved) goals have been achieved this month.  Thanks always to Patty for the encouragement.