charms

I did something fun last week.  I cut some 2 1/2 squares for a friend who is doing a charm quilt.  She suggested that I cut some for myself as well.  This is what I ended up with: a snapshot of my scrap collection.  This is every quilting fabric I have in my scraps.  To be clear, scraps for me are pieces of fabric that are smaller than a fat quarter.  With my awesome organizational skills, I have determined that a fat quarter (give or take a little) is the smallest size that I can neatly fold.  So my scraps are stored randomly.  Whenever I start a quilt I go through them and pull all of the colors for that particular quilt.

So it turned out I had ninety-nine.  So I had include one more from my grandmother stash to make an even hundred.  I will use mine for a leader and enders over the next few months.  It’s great to look at these little swatches because they are full of such great memories.   The yellow plaid one is from a shirt my son had when he was about four.  The bright red floral, call it b-7, is from a weird maternity dress I never actually wore.

One of the things I love about quiltmaking, is the lines that can be drawn between work.  In painting, an artist may have motif that repeat, or a color scheme, but in quiltmaking the fabric can often draw relationships between work.  Also, for me personally, the fabric can have great meaning and memory.  I love the idea that some of these lines are now drawn across the country to a new completely different line of work.

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• Posted in: quilting ♦ recycled
• Tagged: 100 things, improvisational piecing, Leaders and Enders, projects, quilts