Way back in January, I mentioned that I had plans to do a project with the scraps from my Easy Street Quilt, the online 2012 Mystery Quilt over at Quiltville. However, I woke up planning to do a machining project, and instead ended up with ALL my patchwork and quilting fabric out of my cupboard. I had decided to reorganised my fabric stash. Several months down the line, I have revisited my original plans, and this week have produced a lovely new Cat Mat, which I am calling “The Easy Street - the Parking Lot”.
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| String Quilt, Easy Street - The Parking Lot |
In Bonnie K Hunter's book 'String Fling', she introduces her scrap
user system, and a technique of using pages from an old telephone book as the
foundation for stitching small scrap fabrics. This was the technique I wanted to try out, but
as my paper alternative, I had put aside the Christmas edition of the Radio Times,
which by removing the centre staples has given me a double width of paper to
stitch. It has also highlighted to me how much of the Christmas period I
spent on the Easy Street Quilt – I don’t think I watched any TV!
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| 2012 Christmas Edition Radio Times - String Foundation Piecing |
I did do a rough design in my Electric Quilt software, but I
haven’t followed it slavishly, and instead have used my usual technique of
muddling through trying to get everything the right size. My colour scheme
for Easy Street Quilt was Purple, Red and Green, with a Tan background, and most of
my leftover scraps are pretty small, so my paper strips are only 3” wide.
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| Easy Street Quilt Scraps |
Sewing the strips was easy on the machine, and I managed to
get a production line going. I found it was better to remove the paper before tidying up the edges, as once cut, the stitching seam was not as strong to resist the ripping of the paper.
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| String Foundation Piecing |
As regular Followers will know, most of
my work lately has focussed on hand stitching my Nearly Insane Quilt, so it seems like
an age since I sat down at the machine (Note To Self: I really do need to set up a
Leaders and Enders project, especially if Bonnie rolls out another Mystery
Quilt at the end of the year!) For the quarter square triangles, I tried
to use the clever technique I used on my Broken Dishes Cat Mat, but my scrap pieces were too
small and I had to cobble most of them together in a more ‘traditional’
method.
Eventually, the quilt top came together, and was ready for quilting. I had some scrap polyester wadding to use, and I still had
plenty of the Kansas Troubles 'Bound to the Prairie' fabric which I used for the backing on my Irish Chain Quilt, which I have used for the backing. Up close it is a lovely little
print, but from a distance it looks like a murky porridge – however, murky
porridge is good for hiding any less refined stitching when machine quilting…
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| Quilt Sandwich being Machine Quilted |
My actual Easy Street Quilt has yet to be quilted, and part
of this project was to gain some strength experience of machine
quilting to tackle this large project. I was recently inspired by a
little quilting video tutorial on the Green Fairy Quilts blog, by Judi Madsen, which although
aimed at long arm quilting, highlighted to me the importance of marking your quilt, and
planning the design head. Also, I decided to abandon the worry of
getting the tension right for free machine quilting, and stuck with using my
straight stitch with the feed dogs up. I went for a simple channels
of stitching in the squares, rotating it by 90 degrees on each quarter.
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| Quilt Detail |
I
think for this little quilt, the quilting has worked well, and enhances the
pattern nicely – just as it should be. This cat mat is only about
20 inches square, but manoeuvring it on my domestic machine was not as easy as
you would want it to be, which makes me think – how realistic is it going to be
to get the full size Easy Street Quilt under it? I think I need to sit down and
work out a design, and be realistic about how long it is going to take.
One assumes that using a machine means it will be quick, but I think on this
occasion, I need to put that assumption to one side.
To finish it off, I pieced together some binding from the
scraps, machine stitching it on the back, and hand sewing it on the
front.
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| Suzi the Cat on the new Cat Mat |
I am really pleased with how it has turned out, but think I have enough projects in this colour combination for now. It did reduce the scraps, but there are still plenty more.
The good news is, the Quality Control Department has already
signed it off.
Featuring Feline Friday and Crazy Mom Quilts!
