Tag Archives: piecing

All Those Fabric Bits

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Last time, I told you about watching Kate’s videos at her YouTube channel, The Last Homely House. I went back to her channel to watch more and chose a video about using up scraps – because it was first in the queue of her most popular videos. (It’s right here.) She shares her enthusiasm for Terry Rowland’s scrappy quilt. I was sufficiently inspired to see what I have in my bag of bits and ends.

A lot of my bits are from specific quilts. For example, I had a bunch of half square triangles leftover from this Lady of the Lake quilt. The palette is pretty specific on this quilt, all olive greens, pinks and burgundies. The first fabrics chosen were a selection of fat quarters featuring Alphonse Mucha drawings, all Art Nouveau ladies. I just love those prints.

Lady of the Lake quilt pieced by Deborah Cooke

I started to piece the leftover bits into blocks:

leftovers from the Lady of the Lake quilt, pieced together for a mini quilt by Deborah Cooke

I have a few strips of fabrics from the quilt and will add as many borders as possible. This will be a mini quilt to practice my machine quilting – although it’s a good size to be a matching pillowcase. Hmm. I’ll show it to you when it’s done.

I also found the Franken Fish, long forgotten by yours truly.

fish pieced by Deborah Cooke

I called these the Franken Fish because I made a mistake and patched it up. These fish were cut from charm squares – each square was just enough for one set of pieces, so there’s a fish of any given fabric and a background of any given fabric. I made a cutting mistake though and because there was no extra fabric, I patched the pieces.

fish pieced by Deborah Cooke

Their scars are all in the same place. They are Franken Fish.

I must have seen the block somewhere and liked it. I have a vague memory of scribbling it on some random piece of paper in my purse. Now the Franken Fish need an ocean to swim in…

I found a lot of bias already cut. There’s a tremendous amount of the pink, which probably means I had plans for it. I wonder what they were.

cut bias in the stash

And I found these two pieced stars, fussy cut from Kaffe Fassett’s Kimono print.

Star cut from Kaffe Fassett's Kimono, fussy cut and pieced by Deborah Cooke
Star cut from Kaffe Fassett's Kimono, fussy cut and pieced by Deborah Cooke

Interestingly, the camera reset itself on the second one and dimmed down the colours, as if it was saying ‘whoa. That’s a lot of fuschia and orange together.’ LOL It is!

I must have made these while piecing my Pineapple Star, which used a lot of that Kimono print.

pineapple star quilt made by Deborah Cooke

Somewhere (ahem) I have many bits and pieces of Kimono in triangular shapes. I need to find them and make more of these smaller stars because I really like them.

There are more bits and ends, too, but let’s start with these. 🙂

This exercise proved to be more like poking about a hard drive of saved works-in-process than opening a dictionary. Instead of raw materials (bits and ends), I found all sorts of forgotten beginnings. I’ll be finishing these incompletes up first – then I’ll have a look at the remainder for a true scrap-busting project.

First one to be finished will be the Lady of the Lake scraps. Stay tuned!

In the Beginning Dragon Quilt – 3

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In the Beginning Dragon Quilt in blueMore dragon quilt!

Last week, I was piecing the six blocks with the scales in this design—the ones that are stacked on either side of the central panel—and getting the scales oriented the right way. As mentioned then, I took apart my second pieced strip—the one with two strips of scale fabric with a strip of black sandwiched in the middle—and sliced it into squares. I then sewed the squares together with the scales the right way to make the units for the top and bottom of each of these blocks.

Here’s one of my finished blocks:In the Beginning Dragon quilt pieced by Deborah Cooke

All the scales are aligned!

The print called Flames is the one in the corners of this block. The instructions say to cut two 3.5″ widthwise strips out of the fabric, then cut each one into 12 squares. Because I pre-washed my fabric, I only got 11 out of the width, but there was plenty of fabric left to cut the remaining two. This print is also a one-way design: it doesn’t matter which way you think is “up” but it looks better to have the blocks all oriented the same way IMO. I sewed a couple “upside down”, so my stitch ripper got another workout, just because I wasn’t paying attention. After these blocks were done, I pieced them into vertical rectangles by adding a bit of black sashing.

Next, I pieced the dragon squares into horizontal rectangles with those rectangles of the dragon print. (I did play around with the placement of these, then ended up using the same arrangement as the illustration.) When I had the two horizontal panels on the floor, I realized what a nice quilt you could make with just these blocks. Look:In the Beginning Dragon quilt panels pieced by Deborah CookeI put some of the leftover fabric between the rows—it ran out at the left, because these bands are 58″ or so wide—and put a little bit of the flames at the right. I like it better with the background all the same colour, but even one panel of these six-dragon-panels would make a fun quilt.

Next I cut the two rows of Emblems that go between the dragon blocks and the central section. I wanted to have the round medallions centered in both horizontal strips. I cut for the image not the grain. There’s extra fabric included for matching, but the design was printed slightly off-grain (as grid patterns often are). This is where the shrinkage from pre-washing almost got me. I needed more than three widthwise strips to get enough repeats, and managed to get another half width. Phew! It was just enough.

Here’s the top at this point:In the Beginning Dragon quilt panels pieced by Deborah Cooke

The sun was bright, so it’s a bit washed-out—and even with a step ladder, we didn’t get the whole thing!

I’m pleased to see that the joins in the Emblems bands are invisible. I matched the pattern between the circles as I thought it would be less obvious. You can see the print through the back of the fabric, though, so it was pretty easy to match.

Finally, the borders. The border print runs lengthwise on the fabric and there are four repeats across the width. The kit includes plenty, but I wanted prettier corners than shown in the illustrated quilts. This is going to be tough. The border print has a 23.75″ repeat after washing, which doesn’t divide neatly into anything. You already know I have matchy-matchy disease and this border print is going to make me work for it.

In the Beginning Dragon Quilt – 2

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In the Beginning Dragon Quilt in blueI told you a while ago about ordering this quilt kit and (yay!) it finally arrived. Despite all the other things in progress on my worktable, I immediately dove in because, well, dragons.

I was worried that the fabric might feel too much like ink, but it’s quite nice. It’s very smooth and seems a bit lighter than other quilting cotton. The instructions say not to pre-wash the fabric, as it might shrink and the panels might be too small to cut to size. The issue for me is that the fabric wouldn’t be able to be washed ever if I did that. I like to pre-wash so the worst case scenario has already happened before I sew, so into the washing machine it went.

It shrank, of course, as it’s 100% cotton. I like the feel of the fabric much better – it’s a bit thicker now and not as smooth. The unexpected thing was that it shrank in the width and not so much in the length. I measured those six square dragon panels before washing. They have a 1/4″ black border around each image and were 12 1/8″ square at the inside of the black border. After washing, they were 11 1/8″ wide and 11 3/4″ tall. The instructions are to cut them 12.5″ square with .25″ going in the seam allowance, so, exactly as warned, I couldn’t cut them to size.

I’d expected this and had two contingency plans.

The second contingency plan was the tougher one: that I’d make the entire quilt slightly smaller overall and have to recalculate everything. (Gah.) Fortunately, the first contingency plan worked. I checked the black fabric and there’s a lot in the kit, mostly because they included some for the quilt binding. They instruct you to cut the binding on grain, though, which I won’t do – I always cut binding on the bias – so those 9 X 2.5″ crosswise strips of black are now extra fabric. (Actually, that’s 22.5″ by 43″ or so, maybe more if the kit is generous, so it might be enough to cut binding on the bias. We’ll see.)

Each of the six dragons are bordered in black: the instructions call for 1.5″ strips of black for those borders, and the squares end up being 14.5″ square. Once they’re sewn in, they’ll have a 1″ black border. I cut my shrunk dragon panels so that the black border was the seam allowance on the width and made them square. Then I cut my black strips 2″ wide. After sewing on the black borders, I trimmed them up to be 14.5″ square. A teeny bit of the dragon image in the height was lost – less than .25″ – and the black borders are a little bit wider than specified – mine will be about 1 3/8″ wide once the blocks are sewn in – but my finished measurements are all good. (It doesn’t look square in this image because I had the camera at an angle. 🙂 It IS square!)Dragon quilt block sewn by Deborah Cooke

There is a lot of extra fabric around the image in the central panel. Mine just has a little more background than the one in the picture. I’m good with that.

Detail of In the Beginning Dragon QuiltWhen I started to piece the other blocks, things got interesting. The scale print is a one-way design: the scales are shaded at one end and not at the other. It seems to me that I’d want them all to be in the same direction. To my relief, the person who made the sample quilt thought the same thing, because they are aligned that way. At right is a close-up of the side panel from the image on the kit: you can see that the scales are all aligned. I apologize that it’s not really crisp but I wanted it big enough that you could see the scales.

If you follow the instructions, this isn’t the result you’ll get. That’s because of the one-way design. Let’s look at that. There’s a little unit of three squares created by cutting crosswise strips of black and the scale fabric. You sew them together, then cut the blocks from them, like this:Dragon quilt sewn by Deborah Cooke

You join them to an outside rectangle of black then put them around the central square in the block. But look what happens when you change their orientation by placing them around the square:Dragon quilt sewn by Deborah Cooke

The implication of the one-way design strikes! Cutting the strips as instructed will only create the units to be placed vertically, if you care about the scales being oriented the same way. I do, so I’ll take apart the other pieced strip (there are two), cut the strips into squares, and piece them individually with the scales aligned the way I want them for the horizontal blocks.

It also means that I need to divide my units into groups, to make sure the black rectangle is sewn on the outside edge. I’ve split this first group of twelve with vertical scales into two groups: I’ll put the black rectangle on the left side of six of them, and on the right side of the other six. Dragon quilt sewn by Deborah CookeSimilarly, when I piece the units for the horizontal scales, I’ll put the black rectangle on the top of six of them and on the bottom of the other six. That got a bit more complicated, didn’t it?

This also means (hmm…) that I won’t be able to rotate the blocks when I arrange them for the quilt. Their orientation will be set, because of the scales. Prints often repeat across the width of the fabric as well as down the length, so I laid out the six central blocks to check:Dragon quilt sewn by Deborah CookeI’m thinking I might notice the similarities, particularly between the two on the left and also on the two in the middle. Those light-coloured dragons draw my eye! I rotated the blocks before sewing on the pieces with the scales:Dragon quilt sewn by Deborah CookeThe similarities are less obvious this way. Now, I’m ready to piece those six blocks!

What about the quilt in the picture provided with the kit? Either the person who pieced it didn’t follow the instructions and did as I did, or it might be a computer-generated image. That’s interesting, and it means I’ll be keeping my eyes open for other tweaks as I work.

This quilt is a lot of fun! I can’t seem to leave it alone, so I’ll show you more next week.