Monthly Archives: April 2017

Friends On The Way

I have officially deemed this year the year of ‘using what I have.’  I know it’s already April, but I have been living this theme since January; I just haven’t put it into writing until now.  I mentioned it in my last blog post and I am sticking with it.  2017 is all about using the fabric I have instead of buying more fabric, or at least buying as little fabric as possible.

So far it’s going well and has me thinking creatively, like the scrappy triangles I put together for my Stonington quilt.  That’s a good thing.  Sometimes your best work comes from having limited options instead of unlimited ones.

So on that note, I introduce my latest ‘using what I have’ quilt.

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This is one of the scrappiest quilts I’ve ever made.  And I mean I was really digging through my pile of solid colored scraps to come up with the right (or as close to right as possible) solids to bring it all together.

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I wanted to do a rainbow quilt and was pretty sure I had a whole rainbow of solid scraps to make that happen.  And I did!  But the solids are not perfectly matchy matchy.

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If you look closely, there are varying shades of color for some of the smaller solid triangles.  The pink, the purple, the blue and the yellow all have different shades.  That’s because I didn’t have enough scraps to make them the same.

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I actually think the different shades work and I’m pretty happy with that look.

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Another good thing about this quilt is that it didn’t take me long to make it, because almost half of the triangles were already cut.

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There’s a years long Denyse Schmidt quilt I’m working on that has me accumulating leftover triangles.  (I really should write about that project but more on that another time.)  Anyway, that multi-year Denyse Schmidt quilt means I have A LOT of DS fabric.  Like boxes of her fabric.  And I want to use this fabric, but first I wanted to use some of those triangles I had already cut.

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Being able to dig into that pile of already-cut triangles had me feeling pretty proud of myself for using some of them up.

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So what do you think?  Given that a lot of this fabric literally came from the bottom of the bin, I don’t think it’s too shabby.

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I’m now off to dream up new quilts using my stash.  Have a great week!

UPDATE: This quilt pattern is now available for download in my Etsy Shop.  You can DOWNLOAD THE PATTERN HERE.