Scrap Busting & Blogging

        Welcome to my blog!  I love to make quilts, and have baskets of scraps from nearly 15 years of quiltmaking.  It is time to get organized and do something with those scraps, and with the fabric I have accumulated over the years.  I also want to chronicle my quiltmaking journey, and create a gallery of my quilts.  My home is on a stretch of  Lake Erie that some fishermen refer to as Snug Harbor -- hence, the name of this blog. 

     The first project was to sort through the baskets of scraps: 

One of my many overflowing baskets of scraps

        I love looking at other quilting blogs, and I saw some string quilts that looked perfect for using up many of my scraps.  I decided to use a paper-piecing technique (using recycled copy paper), and sewed a 1/2 inch wide red strip down the middle of each block to hold the quilt together.  I just used random strips of random widths; my only "rule" was to avoid using the same fabric twice in a block.




Sewing the strips together.  The red strip was marked at 1/2 inch for all the blocks.





The untrimmed blocks  



Four trimmed blocks just placed together.

The finished quilt top.

          I love the finished top.  The red keeps the wild assortment of colors and prints together, and I have memories of many earlier quilts in each block.    In all, the quilt contains 80 blocks.  I ended up tearing out the paper piecing before sewing the blocks together.   This did help reduce my scrap stash--but certainly did not eliminate it!  I decided to go with some Ikea fabric as a backing - and my sister agreed to pick up some and ship it to me from her nearby Ikea.   I'll post a copy of the finished quilt when it is done.

     While I was sorting through my scraps, I found many forgotten extra blocks from earlier quilts. Next up will be some baby quilts using those blocks.

Take care,

Gretchen