More Adventures with Scrap Strips

I was pretty pleased with Green, the second of my "sew a bunch of strips together and call it good" quilts.  It and its earlier cousin Purple and Blue, were great ways of burning through fabrics that were ugly or just not to my taste, or of which I had long, skinny pieces not likely to be of much use otherwise.  Purple and Blue actually started out just as an attempt to clean out my blue and purple fabric drawers, and it ended up being one of my favorite quilts ever.

These were very easy quilts to make.  Easy cutting, and then lots of long, straight seams that were kind of like driving on Kansas highways.  The piecing was easy, the quilting was easy, and, since all quilting lines cross the entire length of the piece, there was minimal burying of threads involved.  For better or worse, you don't even really have to think very much.  There is a little bit of design-as-you-go, in keeping similar fabrics from ending up too close to each other and in trying to avoid having the lateral seams get too close to lining up.  For the most part the design is just one simple concept.  For Green, the idea was pretty much "I'mma put together 2" strips of green fabric and see what happens"; the end product is just an extrapolation of that original idea.

So, having stumbled onto a way to turn junk into respectable quilts quickly, I have a number of follow-up experiments in the hopper.  Although the color-based pieces were very attractive, though, I find that a lot of the surplus and salvage fabric that I look for ways to do something useful with tends to be multicolored.  In order to be able to use my idea with that stuff, I'm experimenting with using strips of particular values rather than colors.

Here is what happens when you start working with the concept of "two inch strips of darks alternated by one  and a half inch strips of lights."

It looks a little bit like I've already got a solid quilt top there, what you're seeing is actually lengths about eight strips wide lain side by side.  Obviously, the effect isn't as pretty as the color-based quilts were, but I don't think it's half bad.  Again, most of the fabrics were edge remnants or pieces I can't imagine any other use for, so having them as part of a respectable whole gives me a real feeling of something-for-nothing.

Since I didn't bother to plan how many strips I would make or need, I've ended up with an unusual problem: much more pieced area than you would ever want in a scrap quilt.  In fact, I think -- I haven't decided for sure yet -- that instead of one very large quilt with the strips running across the length of the quilt, I will cut those long strips in half, and make two smaller quilts with the strips running width-wise.  Actually, I think I'll cut the strips not exactly halfway, but at around 3/7 of the way across, and then make the "shorter half" wider by...  well, it's hard to explain.  That will have to be the subject of another post.

The Quilt for Niece #2: Design Development.

Last week, I talked a little about how I interviewed Niece #2 about her quilt preferences in order to come up with this plan for her graduation quilt.


(I didn't mention that I drew the above while thinking with Caspar David Friedrich's The Wreck of the Hope on my mind, mostly because I forgot but also because people sometimes look at you funny if you mention art-historical influences for quilt designs).



Anyway, with the basic concept in place, the next step was to figure out the relative widths of the strips. One option was just cutting them all to the same width and fudging the angles, but we're talking about Niece #2 here and I wanted to shoot a little higher than that. To help me get the geometries right, I used simple graphics software to overlay a more exact pattern over the original sketch.

This seemed pretty good, but I wondered if I could create a sense of depth by making the top "shard" with thinner strips. I came up with this:

I checked with N#2, and she agreed that this second version was better.

After that came the torturous application of high-school geometry, as I experimented with different strip widths. Ultimately, and despite the numbers on the above mock-up, I decided that making the vertical black-white strips 3.25 inches wide will yield the right size of blanket. That makes the stripes of the three shards, from bottom to top, 2.9, 2.3, and 1.45 inches wide, not exactly measurements that are marked on your standard quilting rulers. Cutting the fabric involved quite a bit of eyeballing, with some help from this "annotated" mockup:
At this point, I have lots of strips cut long, and a vague hope that I'll actually be able to tie all those weird angles together. Maybe it will be easy? But I totally doubt it.

A Quilt is Born

When Niece #1 graduated from high school, I set a precedent to launch all four of my favorite young punks into adult life with, you know, a blankie. Now it's #2's turn. I sent her a collection of my quilts (with a few of Rebel's thrown in for good measure) and had her tell me what she liked and didn't like.

Things that N#2 like include stripes, asymmetry, and a look inspired by modernism. Sweet! They also include black and red, which are the only two colors of fabric that I do not have coming out of my ears. For the first time in a couple of years, I will actually have to buy short lengths of fabric. But that's OK.

After some fussing with graph paper, I had two designs I liked. They are not something I myself would want to sleep under -- hence the working titles -- but hey, I'm not Niece #2.

UnQuiet Dreams #1



UnQuiet Dreams #2



N#2 has given the nod to the second -- as I'd hoped! -- so at some point I will be moving into fabric acquisition mode. Probably it will become "UnQuiet Dreams," dropping the "#2", and "UnQuiet Dreams #1" will disappear into the vast literature of quilts that never happened. But who knows?