Fabrics N Quilts Scrap Quilt Contest 2012 Free Form Quilt WIP Report

I’m too excited about my Scrap Quilt Contest piece to blog about anything else.  Right now I’m going to show you how my quilt transformed from these nine blocks:

to this ‘Amazing Technicolor Dream Quilt’ top.  I had a difficult time deciding what was the easiest and best way to ‘blend’ my nine blocks together.  Where does one start?  I finally just started.  I chose to start with the black/white center and the orange block.  I also decided that I wanted to create somewhat of a ‘border’ for this quilt using my brown scraps.  I didn’t add those in until I started the blending process.  You’ll see how they come in to play as the quilt progresses.  This first blend seemed together very smoothly and fast.  I sort of figured this is how the rest would go as well.

 

I soon realized that when you’re just worrying about 3 colors (black/white, orange, and brown) it is much easier than you’re working about 5… (black/white, orange, brown, yellow and green) which was the case as I started my ‘blending’ process on the yellow block.  I also realized here that I really needed to add to the black and white center block to make it work with the rest of the pieces.  This was perfect actually because I could add in some of the colors from the color wheel to help with the blending process.

I just realized I should step back a second.  How was I ‘blending’ my blocks?  Well…I pulled out the corresponding scrap fabric containers depending on which colors I was working on.  At first I had out the black/white container, the orange scrap container, and my brown scrap container.  I made strips using the three different fabrics and then cut into the existing blocks to mix the strips in.  The orange blended into the black/white and vice versus.  Same went for the brown.  It was a lot of cutting, sewing, turning, cutting some more, and sewing.  I’m probably not explaining it very well so if it’s something you’re interested in doing I strongly recommend getting the book ‘create your own free-form quilts’ by Rayna Gillman.  She does a really good job explaining the process.

Once the yellow was blended I had to blend the green, sew it to the yellow and then piece it to the first blend I did.

My goal in piecing quilts is to always sew the shortest distance possible.  So…the next section to blend was the red and pink.

After that – purple then blue…turquoise was last.

The blending process of the quilt took me way longer than I thought I would.  I wanted to make sure that everything flowed really well together and to do that…LOTS of cutting, piecing, cutting, piecing, piecing, cutting, and more piecing was necessary.

 

But in the end…it was totally worth it.  My quilt top was finally pieced!  I could hardly believe it!

Next…off to Barb, QuiltsbyBarb, for the quilting!