QUILTING IN OZ: Recycling

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Recycling

Yesterday I mentioned that a couple of the first quilts I made started out with squares from a fabric/Styrofoam wreath. Here they are. The wreath was made by a former daughter-in-law and had hung on my living room wall for maybe 10 years. Not too long after their divorce my son was visiting. I had just started quilting and had made mostly wall hangings. I half jokingly said to him that I'd noticed there was a bunch of fabric in that wreath that would probably look good in a quilt. He said "go for it".

I immediately took the wreath down and starting pulling out the fabric squares, tossed them in a bag in the washer and by the next morning had a whole table full of roughly 3" squares, mostly blues, reds and browns with lots of heart patterns.

I'd already accumulated a bit of a stash and decided I wanted even more variety than the 8 or 10 fabrics that were in the wreath. I also knew I wanted to add some plaids. By the time another day had passed I had cut all of the wreath fabric to uniform size and added another dozen or so prints. I ended up piecing two tops from the resulting squares.

The first quilt was a pattern called "Hidden Hearts" (because four of the four-patches have 3 dark fabrics and only 1 light..which forms a heart sort of--can you spot them?). I think I got the pattern from a Fons and Porter Magazine.

I quilted the panels separately (this was the biggest project I'd attempted at that point and was still building my quilting skills on a little old Brother machine) and then joined them with contrasting fabric strips front and back. I still really like the back of this quilt. And it really does lie flat..I just did a poor job of laying it out for this picture.

With the remaining squares I made 9 patches and snowball blocks with homespun cream plaids. The flip and sew corners on the snowball blocks left me with a lot of triangles so I used them for the border. Isn't it fun how different the same fabrics can look?