Fabric Scrap Quilts

When my older daughter was little I used to sew most of her clothes and a good many of my own as well. I also did craft sewing like blanket pillows and quilts for gifts and doll clothes and such. I had accumulated quite a collection of leftover fabric so I decided to go through it all, wash it, cut it into 6-inch squares and see if I would have enough to make a quilt for my daughter. This project took me quite a number of weeks, just to get all the fabric sorted, washed and cut, never mind what came next!

Once I had it all cut, I was stunned to see just how many squares and how many different colors I ended up with. It had to have been thousands and thousands, literally. So I arranged them in stacks by colors and started matching pairs of fabrics so I could make 9-patch quilt blocks for my daughter's quilt. It took me another many weeks to get all the squares matched up and the blocks sewn and then pieced together into the quilt top.

Here is what it looked like after the blocks were pieced and then sewn together. In this picture you can see that it is layered together with the batting and the backing on the living room floor. I had so many different fabrics that I was able to make 81 9-patch blocks with no two fabrics being paired together more than once!

I still have not finished hand quilting this piece and I keep telling myself that someday I will. But I may just have to bite the bullet and send it out to be machine quilted so I can bind it and give it to my daughter. After all, she will be out of high school soon and moving on. This would be a wonderful collection of pieces of her childhood to bring with her, not to mention a practical and useful quilt.



Once I finished the big quilt, I still had so many squares left that I decided to make smaller crib size quilts by color. I called this one Red Square.


And guess what I called this one...Right! Blue Square! How clever!

I actually had enough squares leftover to make about a dozen of these smaller quilts which I finished and sold on eBay. Then I still had a boatload of squares leftover but I was all squared out by then and just listed them as a lot and sold them all to one lucky bidder for practically nothing.

Who knew that all those scraps of leftover fabric could be so useful and make such pretty and practical things?

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