Crooked Tail Crafts: Scrappy Fall Leaves Quilt

In the spirit of the fall season, I wanted to use some of my moms fall fabrics collection to make a scrappy fall quilt. She really loves fall colors and her collection was getting to be a bit too much. Perfect for me to swoop in and grab a few things to apply to my plans.

I decided instead of making a geometric scrappy quilt, I would instead use a leaf pattern to use with each fabric and use the copper brown fabric as a background. I completed a few in each pattern, and used a bunch of different fabrics to create the scrappy look.

There was only one problem. When I laid out all of my completed blocks, I realized this was going to be a very small quilt, almost a wall hanging.

I searched and searched for more of the copper brown fabric, but it was a much older piece that was no longer available. I had to pivot my plans.

I found a beautiful cream color fabric with fall leaves on it. I thought it would compliment the copper brown well, and decided to create a checkerboard pattern with the two different colors. Once again, I cut out more leaves and mixed everything up to create the scrapping look.

Once all of the blocks were done, I had to come up with a plan to make the mix up happen. Rather than laying it all out, I decided to sew them together randomly into pairs and then matched the two’s together to get four’s. After that I laid them out on the floor to finish it up.

It mostly worked, but I did end up in a pickle when, no matter how I moved them around, there was always two of the same leaf butted up together. Oh well, sometimes random can be matching too.

The top was all together, but it felt like it needed a little bit something more. I found this beautiful purple hand-dyed style fabric that was perfect for tying everything together without being too overbearing. It’s a nice, soft color that is a perfect wrapping around of the leaves.

I struggled with a backing. The first was a fabric I had a lot of and wanted to use up, but after pinning it all together, I decided it was too bold with yellows, and I wanted something more subtle. I took it all apart, and found this amazing blue fabric in my stash with small fall leaves and acorns in fall colors. It was just the type of look I wanted so I re-pinned the quilt and got to work.

I wanted a wind-blown look in the quilt. Using a copper brown thread, I created a circle/waves look in a random pattern. For the border, I went with a stretched meander to look like wood bark of a tree. Finally, I used the cream colored fabric from the blocks to complete with quilts binding. I don’t usually use a light fabric for binding, but in this case I think it worked well.