Lost in Convergence

I really wanted to make something beautiful from the fabric my kids made but I feel like my plan did not quite materialize quite as I had hoped.

I followed the instructions in the book. Here is how it went (in pictures.. bad photos are courtesy of my cellphone!)

I took the spiral on the right to work with - the colors are a touch more muted now they had been washed & dried. 

Erm ...... I was really unhappy with the result. (To me it just looks like a little bit of a mess.) So I began to play with the arrangement. 

No ....

Sigh .... 

Envision telling my girls "I've cut up your beautiful fabric darlings but it isn't working." ... cue lots of tears and disappointment.  

This last one (above) was my favorite but I still didn't feel that it was pretty enough. So the next day I bravely took a rotary cutter to it and made 4 large log cabin blocks with a purple peppered cotton. I was so much happier with this result. 

I'm still going to try the ideas from the convergence book again. Perhaps we will take the knife to these smaller pieces of fabric next.

Scrap Buster: Splatastic Scraps

 
One of the things I wanted Luke to help me with was how to make the materials I use (old clothes) become more interesting - for my designs and quilts to be more innovative - and perhaps on occasion less traditional. I started unloading my huge stash of clothes waiting to be recreated into something wonderful - when Luke asked if I kept scraps - me? keep scraps? - you could almost see him gag when I showed him how much of my scraps I kept! His theory was why use the good stuff when we could use the scraps.



I couldn't argue with him - so we set about sewing the white and blue scraps into 'splats' (my eloquent name for them).

Little blue pieces (above) all sewn together turn into a blue splat (below.)

From these splats we cut 2.5" strips and pieced traditional log-cabin blocks. I thought it was really interesting how when you start to make a structured block from this random splat it all comes together & the little scraps all sewn together look very purposeful - as if you have almost meant to put each scrap where it is. Up close it looks random - but step back and the pattern becomes very clear.





I particularly like all the whites together. I would be happy to make a whole quilt from white scraps like this.

During the process of making my splats I experimented with sewing the seams the wrong way and instead of sewing bits together - sewing little splat patches onto big splats just with a running stitch. I really like the effect it has of making the surface texture of the blue fabric more interesting.





My finished block which I will become the center of a pretty quilt in the near future.

Now I just need to find time to sew all of my scraps together in this way to make them all re-useable fabric pieces ....