I made this scrappy quilt top for @marionberries in the Sew Scrappy Swap (Rnd 2). When my flat folds of fabric get used to a point that there’s little left, I slice and dice them into a few precut sizes that are particularly useful to me: 5" strips, 5" squares, 2.5" strips, and 2.5" squares. I had intended to make her something with 2.5" squares, but as I was looking through my Pinterest board of scrappy quilt projects, I bumped into the Color Stack Quilt Tutorial, that I had wanted to try. It required tons of jelly roll strips, and at that point my box of scrap strips was full to bursting, and I had a 2 inch thick stack on top of the box, that wouldn’t fit inside. After making a few recent scrap quilts, I was out of most brights and rainbow tones, but I had a ton of jewel and earth tones. Since those are Marionberries favorite colors, it was clearly meant to be!
The tutorial required 70 2.5" x 42" strips of fabric. I didn’t have quite that many, and some weren’t a full 42" long. But instead of getting bogged down in worry, I decided to just dive in and start playing. I sorted the strips I wanted to use into piles by length, then went about making pairs of strips that had a good contrast to one another, and were close to the same length. Then I just started stitching them together! The tutorial cuts them into a specific number of 8.5" long sets, but their quilt was also much wider than I wanted to make, so I decided to try 6.5" long sets. After stitching my pairs together, I cut them down into 6.5" widths, and then made stacks of each pair.
I laid out all the stacks I had, and it was about enough for 1/2 of a large lap quilt. Clearly I needed to fill in a bit more space. The tutorial has some narrow sets that are 2.5" wide, and that got me thinking. Why not play with size, by including some bigger strips too? Namely some 5" strips, to use some of my scraps in that bin! If they were going to be twice as wide, I decided to make those chunks twice as long too. So each wide strip set measures 12.5". Even just 3 bands of wide strips filled in a LOT of space!
The original quilt used some black and white narrow strips for a pop of contrast. They are part of what drew me to the quilt, so I made those too. Unfortunately, I really didn’t like how they looked. While the black & white was great with bright tones, it looked odd with the earth tones. So I decided to play around with other options. Instead I used a chocolate brown, and a cream with a subtle brown pattern. Once I switched to this color pairing, the quilt really felt like it was going in the right direction.
I love the pairing of the 2.5" x 2.5" with the 1.5" skinny strips too.
I love how this scrappy quilt top came together. None of the fabrics were created as a set; they are all disparate scraps. But I love how they came together for a cohesive palette. It came out 54" wide by 60"; nice cuddle-up-on-the-couch size. And best of all, there’s now free space in my scrap strips bins!
