Mom's Patchwork Quilt

 

 

After my Halloween fabric kick, I moved on to fall colored stuff. Now, this is my moms favorite season and she loves the colors that come with it. She has so many fabrics, it was a little difficult at first to figure out what to work on. 

 

It didn’t take long though, to get some ideas to pop in my head. I came across 2 packs of 5 inch blocks cut from all her fabrics. There are times that our LQS will offer their machine cutting system to people if they bring their fabric in. Usually it’s for preparing for a class, but sometimes it’s for those that have a project requiring a whole of blocks.  They had different sizes, but for some reason my mom chose the 5 inch. That works.

 

 

I took the packs home and pulled one of the packs out. I thought I’d pulled out the one that was mostly reds, oranges, and yellows. I got to work reducing the blocks to 2 ½ inch pieces. My plan was to try making a double irish chain with green chains and the colors in between as the fall colors in the patchwork forest.

 

 

I had some green fabrics and I picked up a solid dark green and a couple more green prints to mix it up and make it scrappy.

 

My first step was to construct the green chains. I whipped through it and made sure to mix a few of the reds and oranges to incorporate the other blocks together later.

 

 

Now, I know what you’re thinking… this is not a double irish chain quilt. It’s not even a single irish chain quilt. It was about this time that I realized my reds, oranges, and yellows also included pinks and browns and even greens. This wasn't going to work. I needed to change course.

 

 

I set the chain blocks aside and included them in another quilt as it was intended to be. More on that later. I kept going with sewing the other scraps together and came up with these fun and colorful 8x8 blocks.

 

 

I decided to keep it simple and found a nice fabric to add sashing between the blocks with capstones in the corners from more of the scraps. I put a matching border around it and called the top complete.

 

 

The backing is this super nice purple fabric with fall colored leaves. My mom had several yards of this, making it a great pick for a backing. I did a basic meander for the quilting, and used a different fall colored fabric for the binding.

 

 

It’s not a very big quilt, which is unfortunate. I had more fabric and could have made it bigger. In the moment, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the patchwork of scrappy fabrics. This quilt really helped me build confidence in the scrapwork abilities and I will trust the process more in the future.

 

 

When it was all said and done, I was cleaning up and sorting the fabrics left and found the bag of 5 inch squares that were ACTUALLY the fall color I’d intended. I had mixed the bags up.  Ha! Oh well, I got 2 quilts out of this project and now I still have more to do another. I’ll take it.