Scrappy Love

I have had so much fun over the last few months dreaming up and creating Scrappy Projects with the Festival of Scrappiness going on over at Stitched in Color. There have been so many cool and original projects and tutorials posted that are sure to inspire you. I have always wanted to try string piecing, so, for my first project I used blue and purple and pink and green scraps to build this log cabin style mini quilt. I started making it as a mug rug, but was having so much fun that I just kept building.

I quilted it in continuous wonky square starting at the center and working my way out. The back of the mini is more scrappy pieces and my polka dot bias binding.

This is my first mug rug. Ever. It was so much fun! So I made two more. This one was fairly random in my color choices. I built it in a wonky half log cabin style and pieced some of my smaller scraps just for fun.

I quilted it in the half log cabin shape starting at the opposite corner and working out. It looks pretty cool. 

I used some pink flower yardage to make .5" double fold straight grain binding that I zig zagged in place. Here is how I made those kickin mitered corners.

I am still lovin the Tutti Frutti collection that I've collected and all these scraps that came together for my second mug rug. I'm pretty sure I didn't have any plan when I started making this other than spreading the colors out.

I checker board quilted the mug rug with 1" squares and have decided that my walking foot is one of the best things ever. The fabric didn't pucker or bunch up like it has before whenever I've tried to quilt in overlapping patterns.

 

 This is my third mug rug that I whipped up using wonky tiny strips that I'd originally cut up to make little rag wreaths. But this was more fun. I quilted .5" diagonal lines and bound it with more pink flower tape and a scrap of white fabric for the back.

I redoing my bedroom right now with robin's egg blue, brown and tan. Above my bed I have two cute blue candle stick things with a framed generic picture between them. Since taking Curves class, I've had a hankerin to make some of these adorable mini wonky stars that were in one of our projects. I thought I would make several and then just fill in a background behind them using more neutral-ish scraps. But it just didn't want to come together. So, I called in my husband for back-up because he has a great eye for color, art, and design. After playing with my stars and fabric scraps, he decided that I should make my stars into flowers using some vine patterned fabric. I looked at my stars and thought, but they're stars! Never would I have thought of them as flowers. But he was right. He left the room to my huffing and "gosh darnit's" because once he threw me the idea, I just knew it would be awesome as most of his ideas are, but it would be more time consuming, as usual. But the things that take longer are the things that are usually worth doing.

So! Here is my Starbright Flower Garden! It's not quite finished yet, but I wanted to take a picture and send it in before the end of the contest and we were allowed to submit quilt tops. I'm going to do some applique style stitching that I've seen around blogdom lately and will post a little tut when it's all done.