Tag: Using stash in quilting

Turkey Tracks:  July 17, 2015

 Stash Obsessions

I have been obsessed with a quilting project for almost a month now…

…clearing out the 2-inch squares bin…

…it’s been about four years…at least.

And the whole purpose of cutting up all useable fabric after completing a quilt is that…one day…you need to use them.

Bonnie Hunter’s rule is that when the bin gets full, you have to slow down and USE THOSE SQUARES.

Well, here’s the project.  (And I think I wrote about this before.)

 

This year is the American Patchwork and Quilting Magazine‘s four-patch challenge–which Bonnie Hunter is participating in as well.

So I’m going to turn the 2-inch squares into four-patch blocks.

When I got obsessed, I had already gotten this far with the block Bonnie is using:

But, right in the middle of putting the gorgeous magenta sashing on these blocks, I have lost my mind.  I have not attempted to make the four-patches as a leader/ender project.

No, I thought I’d just sew them all up.

Do you have any idea how many squares there were in that bin?

I am now counting them just for fun.  There are 600 in the quilt above.

So, I realized as I sewed a light square to a dark square, that I had a lot of blue and neutral and red and neutral possibilities.

(These are NOT all the two-inch squares by a long shot.)

Here’s a larger version of the block Lissa Alexander used in American Patchwork and Quilting Magazine–which I used to made “Happy Baby Quilt.”  Put on point, one gets a long chain of the red squares.

And what about a Jacob’s Ladder block for the blue and white?

Here are two of these blocks stacked together.  Wow!  I really like this block.

I have spent many, many hours now sewing the light/dark squares together and that’s all done:

So the bin is now full of the two-square strips.

I’ll move on to making the four-patch blocks next.

But first, Bonnie Hunter’s method of pressing open strips of blocks BEFORE cutting them apart really works.  Visit her web site (Quiltville.com) for tutorials on handling your stash and tips like how to press FAST.

I am still loving the four-patches inside a square–and especially as I am using the 3 1/2-inch blocks to make the outer square.  (Cut them on the diagonal.)  So I will make more of these as I go along.

 

Quilt count from this effort?  A red/neutral quilt, a blue/neutral quilt, the almost finished Bonnie Hunter block quilt, more of those blocks, and lots and lots of four-patches.

Yep.  It’s good to slow down and create some “assets” from time to time.