Friday, February 16, 2007

Now what to do with them?

I must admit that I am not the world's most accurate fabric cutter. Most of the time I design my quilts on my own, and I often cut in batches as needed so I don't feel compelled to figure out exactly how many 3" strips I need before I begin piecing. When I do get going cutting strips, I sometimes get carried away, leading to a shortage of fabric later in the process when I need a different size strip or realize that the fabric I have almost used up is exactly the right one for the border. I have tried recently to be a bit more careful recently, especially where border fabrics are concerned, but the impact has not been obvious unless I was working from a pattern in a book.

I originally intended to use blue and orange in all the blocks in my Rattlesnake quilt. Since Karen K. Stone's patterns do not give very precise cutting directions, I happily cut bunches of orange and blue strips from all the fabrics I thought might be fun to put in the quilt. At some point, however, I got the idea of having blue on blue blocks in the outer part of the quilt, blue and orange/red at the next "ring" of blocks, and orange and yellow blocks at the center so that there would be some luminosity. It looks wonderful in EQ, although I am not sure it will work quite as well using my real blocks. I just finished piecing all the yellow and orange/red blocks and all the blue/orange blocks, and I see that I am left with this:
What in the world am I going to do with all these orange and red strips? I do have a red and yellow lender/ender quilt that some could be used for,but this is a lot of strips! A new level of achievement even for me in the over-cutting department. Also, my blues seem to be mostly blue-greens and rather light strips. This may call for some creative quilting in my next quilts!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks like there is a scrappy string quilt in your future!

flippytale Quilter (Christine) said...

oh those strips are delicious! and the complimentary orange and blue will look stunning. patterns? dunno, but they are calling to you!

Debra Dixon said...

One time I went through my whole stash and cut various strips off the ends of most of the fabrics. It was a great reference I could use for planning instead of pulling all the fabrics out all the time to compare pieces.

Those strips will come in handy for another project. If you want, you can swap them on Trader's Village.

Jules said...

When I have leftovers, I let my kids sew them together in a random way and make them into pillows or pillowcases, depending on the size of the finished project.