Out Of The Bag!!

In a previous post I was talking about the big brown paper bag that Stephanie had gifted to me at guild meeting Monday Night. Actually, it is one of several bags! It is always like Christmas for me when she ditches her scraps :c)

Yesterday afternoon I started wondering what I could do with all the ends of her strip pieced panels...Not ALL the fabrics are batiks, but quite a few of them are...there were also some little panel parts of orientals (just a few) and a wide panel of a red print with bright green on either end...like a panel you would piece if making puss in the corner blocks. I piled all the pieced panel parts in a pile (wow..say pieced panel parts in a pile three times fast!) and I saw that I could get A LOT of kaleidoscope wedgies cut out of them! So that is what I started to do....there was enough to do 36 blocks if I alternated the pieced wedgies with solid wedgies. This also gave me a good opportunity to use up the few batiks that I have. I've never been drawn to batiks even though I think the quilts made with them are gorgeous, I'm just an old fashioned printy girl!

I wanted this to look very random, so I matched up points in sets of 4 and started cutting solid triangle wedgies to go with them. I sewed 8 wedgies into "stop signs" and then arranged them on the floor....I knew I would need corner triangles on the pieced wedgies of 1/2 the blocks, and corner triangles on the solid wedgies of the other half of the blocks.

I went back to the trimmings pile of what was left from cutting the pieced wedgies, and began to cut corner triangles from that! I sewed the pieced triangles on half of the blocks..hmmm..I was liking it so far, but it needed something to go on the other block corners that would kind of tie it all together! There were bright colors in the quilt, and muted olive greens....what was going to tie it all together? Well, everything IS better with cheddar, isn't it? I love cheddar with poisony green in antique quilts, so I thought that might work for this one, and I had JUST enough to cut 72 cheddar triangles out of a small piece of cheddar batik that at some point found it's way into my stash!

I just sewed the blocks together.....and now I am rushing to get this uploaded, and then to the shower, and then to clean up the bomb that went off in my house while I was busy playing with Stephanie's scraps. The quilt still needs borders, but at least it can be moved without messing up the layout. Jason and Shanon come tomorrow and I need to CLEAN THIS HOUSE! I am one excited Mama. I've also got a guild meeting tonight...and need to be out of here in 2 hours. Auuughhhh! But it was so fun to be able to play today and to stretch beyond my confort zone with this kaleidoscope quilt! I'm calling it "OUT OF THE BAG" because that is where it came from!

Bonnie