Quinn
72” x 72”
She’s quiet on the outside but inside she is full of energy and desire. You wouldn’t know it, but she is a lover of dance and travel and experimentation. She only needs a fellow warm heart to open her up, then all the colour and joy pour out.
You’ve heard me say before that I am easily swayed by suggestion. I was teaching my Braided Rug class and someone asked about a square block. My samples were all rectangles at the time. So we made a square together. I liked it so much I made more and more of them. Actually, I made 36 of them. And now, if I teach the class again I will need another sample!
The bin of scrap strips was not emptied, but this did put a dent in it. And it forced me to sort those fabrics! I did have to supplement with some fresh strips cut from the stash to get enough in a few colours. Remember, though, fabric is fabric.
Around the time I finished most of the blocks - I sewed each colour into a 4 patch as I completed each set - I cleaned up my batting scraps. The pile was unruly and large. That spurred a decision to assemble this in a Quilt As You Go style. It used up most of what was left of my old design wall (it was wrapped in quilt batting) and a few other pieces. Brilliant!
I want to do a proper comparison of the techniques, but here are my initial thoughts.
It uses up more material on the quilt back. But only because my blocks were 24” square, which means more than a half of a width of fabric with an odd cut left over. That’s why I don’t have all the same fabric on the back, I didn’t have enough.
It is very handy to quilt in smaller sections. I could change the thread colour to match and there is no wrangling of a large quilt.
Assembly is both easy and fiddly. Just a straight seam joining the front seams, but trimming and hand sewing to finish the back.
I don’t think it necessarily saves time, because of the hand stitching required, but not a bad technique overall.
This is not the first time I’ve done Quilt As You Go, but the previous time I used strips as joining, an entirely different technique. For this quilt I followed the instructions laid out my Judy Gauthier in her book, Quilt As You Go For Scrap Lovers.
To finish the quilt I found a brilliant Tula Pink stripe. Not exactly a rainbow, but it had all the same colours as my colourful quilt. Originally, I thought I might match the binding to each block, but this was too perfect. One last bit of hand stitching to finish the quilt.