Addicted to Scraps: 12 Vibrant Quilt Projects
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About this ebook
Bonnie K. Hunter
Bonnie K. Hunter is passionate about quiltmaking, focusing mainly on scrap quilts with the simple feeling of "making do." Bonnie enjoys meeting with quilters, teaching workshops, and lecturing to quilt guilds worldwide. She lives in Wallburg, North Carolina. Her website is quiltville.com
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Addicted to Scraps - Bonnie K. Hunter
SCRAPS!
Basic Sewing Guidelines
The patterns for the quilts in this book are based on rotary cutting and machine piecing methods. It is assumed that the reader has a basic knowledge of quilting techniques and processes. The tools needed are those used for basic quiltmaking: it’s necessary to have a sewing machine in good working order (to avoid frustration), but no fancy stitches are necessary—just a good straight stitch. I’ll share with you a few additional tips I’ve picked up along the way to make quiltmaking easier and faster.
That ¼˝ Seam Allowance
Accurate cutting and piecing are based on a ¼˝+ seam allowance. It’s important to sew a ¼˝ seam with your machine. If you can master this, all your blocks will be the intended size and you’ll be able to match points perfectly. Even if your machine foot has a ¼˝ guide on it, it’s easy to overshoot a ¼˝ seam just by the nature of that guide already being outside
of your ¼˝ foot. Many of us have a habit of running the fabric too hard up against the guide, giving a seam that is too wide. Do not trust any feet with built-in
guides until you do a seam test!
For more details on sewing an accurate seam allowance and creating a seam guide, see Setting Your Seam Allowance. Do what you have to so your units come out to the appropriate size before going any further. You and your quilt will be glad you did!
The Scrap User’s System
As a longtime scrap quilter, I needed a method that would keep my scraps readily available for ease in making scrap quilts. I much prefer to be sitting and sewing rather than pressing and cutting from odd-sized pieces of fabric. I realized that if I could tackle the leftover scraps from each project as I finished it, the pieces would be cut and ready for me to sew whenever I had time.
Most of the quilts in this book are made from common sizes of units that are then assembled into blocks. Units are usually created by cutting and sewing squares, rectangles, or triangles cut from strips. These strips are cut in widths that we use all the time in traditional patchwork, and they are the basis of my own Scrap User’s System of storing strips in usable sizes so they are ready to go. By precutting my scraps into strips and storing them by size and value or color family, I have the ease of pulling the perfect size and color so I can just sit and sew. It’s a scrap user’s dream!
Scrap Strip Sizes
I cut fabric pieces that are at least 10˝ long into strips that are 1½˝, 2˝, 2½˝, and 3½˝ wide. I don’t cut new yardage or fat quarters this way, just the scraps that are left over from whatever project I’ve been working on.
I store the strips by color and value in stacked plastic drawers that live under the table of my longarm quilting machine. I have a drawer for each strip width.
Within each size-labeled drawer, I sort strips into color families. For example, in my 2½˝ strip bin are color bundles of blue, green, red, purple, orange, brown, and so on. I stack and roll strips into an oblong bundle (think hot dog bun instead of jelly roll) and place each color family in a one-gallon plastic zipper bag to contain them. This prevents wrinkles, tangled strips, and raveling of the raw edges.
Before I began sorting strips by color, I would have to dig through everything to find the color I was searching for and then iron the strips. But not anymore! I have found what works for me.
I cut smaller fabric pieces and strips less than 10˝ long into individual squares and bricks by strip width in the following sizes:
1½˝ × 1½˝ squares and 1½˝ × 2½˝ bricks
2˝ × 2˝ squares and 2˝ × 3½˝ bricks
2½˝ × 2½˝ squares and 2½˝ × 4½˝ bricks
3½˝ × 3½˝ squares
These shapes work great together. Using the stitch-and-flip method, you have everything you need at hand to create flying geese units and star point units with ultimate variety. Just put the squares and bricks by your machine and start building units whenever you have a few minutes!
Where else can you use precut squares in a variety of sizes? How about block corners, block centers, cornerstones for sashing, and even checkerboard borders? The list is endless.
Anything that is too small or oddly shaped to work as a precut strip is delegated to my string or crumb bins.
Neutrals vs. Colors
When working on a scrap quilt—especially one that uses a lot of busy fabrics in every color under the rainbow with a whole lot of variety—I tend to use background fabrics that have less color than the foregrounds. In modern quilt terms, you might find these fabrics termed low volume.
I simply call them neutrals.
I love a wide variety of neutrals in a neutral-background quilt. Most of the time when I am thinking lights,
I am thinking mostly in terms of neutrals: white to cream to beige to tan, with some pastels thrown in that are very light—pink, yellow, blue, green, and so forth. But they have to be very pale if I am going to use them in a lighttoned scrappy background.
When considering a fabric for a background, look at the background, or ground, of the fabric itself. That will tell you where it wants to play. For instance, a cream fabric with blue flowers and green leaves will qualify as a background neutral because of the cream ground of the fabric. Black music notes on white? It’s a neutral because of the white background. Focus on the ground, not on the print.
How dark will I go on neutrals? Keep in mind the color of a brown paper bag. If I am using many shades of neutrals as a background, the color of a brown paper bag is as dark as I will go. If I go darker than that, it becomes a medium and has crossed over to the foreground side! If you keep the image of a brown paper bag in mind, you’ll never go wrong when deciding how dark your neutral background should go.
I tend to think of darks
more as colors. They are everything that is not light. That means most mediums read as darks against the neutral lights to me. I will kick mediums to the other side to play their part in the main design as foreground.
A Few Notes about the Project Instructions
Materials lists for scraps are approximate based on cutting all pieces efficiently from 40˝-wide strips. You may use more or less fabric depending on your cutting style, and yardage amounts may vary depending on the number of different fabrics you use.
Always feel free to add more scraps!
Backing yardage allows for either horizontal or vertical seams, whichever makes most efficient use of the fabric.
For double-fold bindings, I cut my strips 2˝ wide and sew them to the quilt with a ¼˝ seam allowance. This gives me a nicely filled ¼˝-wide finished binding. This is my preference, but the yardage allows for cutting wider