Thursday, April 25, 2013

Light, Bright, Dull, Dark

Whenever I am putting together scrappy blocks or scrap quilts, I always try to include "light, bright, dull, dark." It isn't catchy, it doesn't rhyme, but it works when putting lots of disparate fabrics together.

More memorable is the phrase, "when life give you scraps, make quilts." Life is beating me up and I needed something easy and meditative to sew this afternoon.  I decided to make the border "fabric" for the scrappy geese quilt.  If sewing was my meditation, my mantra was, "light, bright, dull, dark."

Made Border Fabric

I made 60 inches of made fabric by sewing forty 2-inch width-of-fabric (WOF) strips together. I expected some differences in the WOF measurement, but maybe not quite as much as I found.

Now that I've sewn it all together, it's time to cut it up into borders.  How many times and how ways as quilters do we cut up fabrics only to sew them back together again?

I'm joining Pat Sloan's Show & Tell Linky party today.

7 comments:

Brenda said...

great mantra! I like how this turned out!

Scrapatches said...

As quilters we not only cut the fabric and then sew it back together with other fabrics ... creating an infinite number of blocks and designs, we also "unsew" it. This is a term I learned only recently when a pattern called for "removing stitches." We do seem to create work for ourselves. Good thing we think this kind of work is play ... :) Pat

Gail in Vegas said...

Love your "light, bright, dull, dark" phrase when sewing a large selection of fabrics together.
Sorry to hear life is not being kind.
There is a street I go down on the way to work and a fence was put up a day ago to close one lane. That made the part where you turn onto the street very narrow and I was being so cautious about not scrapping the driver's side of the car on the fence that the front passenger tire ran into the curb and blew out. Sheesh, I felt dumb. Not to mention that new tires are kind of expensive. And I was trying to get to a 7:30 am meeting.
Maybe it can be blamed on the current full moon. . .

Quilter Kathy said...

Life has been beating me up too :(
My next job interview is May 7th.
It is stressful, eh?
We will just keep stitching until we find our right path.

Anonymous said...

Paul used to tell people all the time that I spent my time cutting up perfectly good pieces of fabric and sewing them back together. =) He was teasing, because he loved what I did. That's a great way to get a lot of border relatively quickly, though!

Anonymous said...

Someone taught me that mantra a while back and I use it when planning non-scrap quilts too. I like your made fabric.

sheila 77 said...

That's a very good idea, as just taking random strips and sewing often doesn't work.

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