Wednesday, August 31, 2005

My Long Term Scrap Projects



Well today I thought I would share my long term scrap project with you. I am in love with civil war repro fabrics and just love civil war utility type quilts. I love the ones women would make for heavy use - your daily ones. Not the fancy smancy best company ones - well those are lovely but - there is something about the daily use ones that tugs at my heart!

So this summer 2 friends and I decided to go through our stashes of civil war repro fabrics (or civil war repro "like") and cut 4" x 20" strips and swap! So I now have 180 4" strips to play with! I"m having such a fun guilt free time playing with these fabrics. Somehow if I cut a strip off a big piece to work on them I feel so guilty that maybe I "need" that extra strip later. But now that they are cut - no worries!

Any way I have 4 projects planned with them. As I go through the strips I'm cutting for all 4 projects, but have only started sewing the first one - my kaleido quilt. This pattern is not really a traditional civil war style quilt, but I've always wanted to make one and it worked just so well with the strips I decided I was going to go for it.

I've always loved how this pattern makes those circles pop out at you and dance around. And I also get to play with my new kaleido ruler I bought at the Chicago Quilt Festival last spring to make it! I'm loving it. It is the Marti Michell Kaleido-Ruler - only I have the smaller size one, not the large size one here:
http://tinyurl.com/9vf5u
My other 3 quilts are going to be a basic one-patch tumbler, a strippy set 1000 pyramids type quilt and a teeny-tiny 9-patch scrap quilt. I saw one of those teeny-tiny 9-patch quilts at the Chicago Quilt Festival at one of the vendors booths and WOW - it was simply amazing. Now it may take me forever to get this quilt to any size, but it was so beautiful. The squares in the 9-patches finished to 3/4" square! I"m going to up mine to 1" square just for ease of cutting, but was it awesome. I wish I would have asked if I could take a picture. I still regret that.

So that is about it for todays post - which by the way, don't get to used to daily posts! It just so happens that this week is a bit slow so I have time to play. And since my blog is new I've got tons of subjects to chat about. But there are going to be times where I'm so busy I may not post for a week! Just wanted to warn you!

3 comments from wonderful readers:

Tonya Ricucci said...

ooh, love the idea of little bitty nine-patches. very appealing. like the kaleidoscope quilt - I got so frustrated with one I was doing years ago I took it apart and then apparently donated the individual blocks to charity, cuz I couldn't find them when it came time to work on the orphan.
Once a week posts??? boooooo.

Sarah said...

Dawn -

Welcome to our "Mavericks" group. Love the quilts you've posted. PLease show us more!

Sarah N.

Finn said...

Hey dawn, so good to find you finally ! Thanks Tonya !! I do owe that girl...LOL.

What I've seen so far is marvelous..really great having you with us at Mavericks..*VBS*