Make Crazy Patch Quilt
Is a festival of scrappiness hosted by Rachel of. There’s also a lovely associated getting geared up. Join in by making a quilt mostly from scraps by the end of March to win some goodies that she’s amassing.
Crazy quilts are pieced with a variety of fabrics Crazy quilts and quilted accessories (like this pillow) are as unique as their creators. Use any desired combination of texture and color for a one-of-a-kind heirloom-quality piece.
Get the details over on her blog. Long ago I wrote a about using ALL scraps of fabric, where we should be clear in understanding that scraps in my studio are often much smaller than what might pass for scraps for others. In short, I don’t like to let any square inch go to waste.
How To Make A Crazy Quilt Block
However, the techniques of and what I’ll show below can be used with fabrics of all shapes and sizes (well, that are larger than 0.5″ in all directions). All the caveats of apply. In particular, we should relax and expect the unexpected. This is improvisational and leaves little room for control. The Pitfalls of Bias Cuts: A friend of mine sent me a pile of scraps and I decided to handsew them into giant improv blocks. It was satisfying to do and went well for a while.
That is until I met pieces cut off the grain. See this edge ripple?
If you look closely, you can see the threads of the weave swoop up and to the left. I didn’t trim that piece back onto the grain (i.e., squared up, with warp and weft parallel to the edges of the fabric) and it came back to bite me.
This would never lay flat and would pucker if I built the patchwork out further from there. A Solution: We are going to make crazy quilt blocks, foundation pieced on paper. The paper will stabilize those stretchy edges for us. We’ll make 5″ squares that you then can use as you would any charm pack. Cut 5″ squares of paper.
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I use phone book pages. Choose a nice small wacky scrap. And find any other scrap to start the party. Place second scrap face down on the first, pin through all three layers, and sew a quarter-inch seam with just a slightly smaller stitch-length than you’d normally use. Open flat and finger-press the seam.
You could also use a dry (non-steam) iron if you like. Continue the process. Notice that sometimes you’ll need to trim the seam to a quarter-inch. Just eyeball it and use your scissors. Keep on going. Once you have covered the entire paper square, give it a good quick press to crisp the seams. Flip and trim down to a 5″ square using the paper as a guide.
Make Crazy Patch Quilt Block
Don’t remove the paper until you’ve finished the next step of using the block to make something else. The paper stabilizes the edges and prevents bias distortion. And hold onto those trimmings; they’ll be great scraps to use in other blocks. Nowjust keep making more blocks! I love how different and how wacky they can get. Next time we’ll talk about some time-savers ( ETA:!) and then I’ll show you a quilt or two I made with this sort of process.