A long long time ago, I was packing up my craft room and came across some weird-shaped scraps - cut off bits of backing fabric from previous projects, long narrow strips of fabric, not entirely straight. Complicating factor was that the print was quite large so it didn’t look that good in strips. I was almost ready to toss them but I didn’t want to waste all that fabric.
Then I bought Quilts for Scrap Lovers by Judy Gauthier and she has an entire chapter on how to transform outdated prints or prints you don’t like. I took her advice (and a pattern from her book!) and paired the fabric with another, very different fabric (also backing cutoffs) and cut the animal print fabric into small pieces. It might sound counter-intuitive but it really worked to cut this large scale pattern into small pieces.
After I cut them it was time to box them up and they didn’t get unpacked until last month when I finally felt like tackling this project.
AIMR
(Linda -In the year 2025, I am happy to be alive! :us:)
2
So glad to see this finished! Both sides are nice to look at.
I’ll have to check out the book…large print fabrics are tough to make into a quilt, but it seems your method of just cutting them up worked great! Love the colors…nice and cheerful.
She’s also on YouTube, she’s written several books on scrap quilts. She’s a big believer in cutting up all your scraps into standard sizes, I don’t really do that personally, but I like her tips and tricks about blending different styles of prints.
For projects for kids I like to use novelty print fabrics, but the scraps are a real challenge. I don’t really like them for myself, but I don’t want to waste the scraps either.
Thanks! Now I know this trick I’ve been playing around with a lot of different prints and it really works.
This fabric had a lot of empty space, leaves and the occasional beheaded animal. If you use it in one large piece, it looks bad because you just know it wasn’t supposed to look like that. But cutting it up means you highlight different aspects of the print and then it suddenly looks really different. If you want to try without cutting fabric, cut 3", 4" or 5" squares from a piece of cardstock and use the cardstock as s frame. I guarantee your ugly fabric will look very different.
I hadn’t done machine quilting for a while, so I also used this as a practice piece for the Halloween quilt that’s up next. I want to use the same quilt pattern for that one.
We’re going through a cold spell here so I’ve used it a lot, more than expected. It’s a generous lap size and I like the drape of it - there’s enough quilting that the layers are held together nicely, but not so much quilting that it feels too stiff for a blanket.
Lots of love for this!! Congrats on being a featured project this week! 