Purple Kool-Aid: Scrap Quilt Finish

Hello and happy Friday everyone!  This week's finish is another quick scrap quilt I made in response to my overwhelming selection of scraps. I try to think of my scraps as a gift rather than a burden :P

You may remember a couple of scrap quilts I made back in the Spring and posted tutorials along with. I'm going to do the same with this quilt toward the bottom of this post. I'm calling this one Purple Kool-Aid!

The quilt is made from purple, turquoise, blue, yellow, and grey scrap squares.  I cut squares to 3.5" and 6.5".  I lucked out with some great fussy-cut squares that make the quilt so fun! Girly, but not too girly.  The final quilt measured 36" x 48".

I wanted to try out a new free motion quilting design so I chose loops in alternating sizes that I've seen several places. I used a turquoise thread that worked really well with the variety of fabrics. I love this FMQ design because it was so fast!

I assembled the backing from some "ugly" fabrics I've had in my stash a while. I don't like to call any fabric ugly; I really think that every fabric would be perfect in some quilt.  But I am just not a fan of that purple, no idea what I was thinking when I bought it.

I machine stitched the binding down to both sides. I already had the perfect stripe in my stash!  This quilt is going in my "Emergency Baby Quilt" pile until it's needed.

As far as how to go about making a quilt like this for yourself, here's how to go about it:

Step 1, pick a color scheme and a medium-smallish size of square that you think you can easily cut lots of from your scraps.  For example, 6.5" would not have been a good size for me to pick because I rarely throw anything into the scraps bin until it gets to less than 5".  I chose 3.5" for this quilt.  Good sizes would be 2.5", 3.5", 4.5".

Step 2, halve, double, and triple your size to get your alternate size squares.  This is slightly tricky because you have to deal with the seam allowances, but you're just trying to figure out what other sizes of squares compliment the one you have.  The way to do this is to subtract the seam allowance, do the math (halve, double, etc) then add the seam allowance back.

So for example. If you picked 3.5" as your base size.  3.5" minus the seam allowance of 0.5" = 3" Divide that in half = 1.5"  Add back the 0.5" seam allowance = 2"  Four 2" (unfinished) squares sewn in a four patch measure 3.5", the same as your base size.  Likewise, one 6.5" block would be equal to four 3.5" blocks in a four patch and a 12.5" block would be equal to four 6.5" blocks.  I made my quilt with only 2 sizes of squares, but you could use as many sizes as you like.

Step 3, dig into your scraps and cut as many blocks in your base size as possible, (or until you get tired of cutting). Also be looking for larger scraps to cut your larger alternative sized blocks from and smaller ones to cut the smaller sizes from. I recommend not counting or trying to keep track of blocks at this stage. Just cut as many as you can and once you've laid out your quilt you can come back and cut a couple more if you need to.

Step 4, start assembling your blocks into two patches and then four patches. Combine four by four units made from smaller blocks with the bigger blocks to make larger and larger patches.  (Four 3.5" blocks = one 6.5" block, etc). I chose to assemble my blocks into 12.5" square patches and then assembled those into the quilt top.

Here is where, if you find that you are one block short of making a four patch from on particular size, you can just go cut one more.  Make the largest quilt you can (or make two smaller quilts) and you're done, no counting no measuring!

I'm linking up to Finish it Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts and the TGIFF OctoberQuest2 at Quilter in the Closet.


PS- if you are a scrap quilter go check out the 3rd Annual Scrap Challenge and link a finish by the 15th!