Little Projects.

A while back I signed up for a Round Robin with The Patchwork Place.  A good friend of mine takes classes with them and told me about it.  I've never done a proper Round Robin before so I thought I'd give it a go.  I've finished my first block and am ready to post it off - it's flying away to Aussie.  Our instructions were to make a 12 1/2 " block, on-point, representing our favourite feature about where we live. 

Mine represents the bush gully with the creek flowing through it that hides at the bottom of our block of land.  The colours are for the NZ bush and the dawn skies that I love and the koru has four buds on it for the members of my family.  The green border symbolises the greenness that surrounds me everywhere I look. 

Looking forward to receiving the next set of instructions!



I'm also going to admit that crumb quilts and me just don't go.  I made a start, and that's about as far as it got.  So I've found a new way to use my scraps (maybe not teeny crumb scraps) and have a handwork project to do in those moments as well.  I'm paper piecing a square and diamond quilt.  Because I want to organise a colour wash layout, I'm basting everything first and will then stitch them together when I have them laid out how I like.  So it might take me a few years, but all good things take time right?

Scrappy Crumb Quilts

My scraps are getting out of hand.  But it's hard to throw them away.  As a wise lady recently said to me,"I paid the same amount per metre for that teeny scrap as I did for that fat quarter!"  And when you've collected a few kilos of teeny scraps, you wonder how much meterage there actually is in the pile.  So I pulled them all out (actually my daughter did - the picture above is her 'nest for birdies'), and decided to do something useful with them.

I'd never really heard of the name 'crumb quilts' until I read about them here, on the lovely Raewyn's blog.  I knew about the concept (sewing any scrap bigger than 1/2 inch into a bigger block, then sewing it all in together), but now they have a delicious name to go with them.  But I'm regimented kinda girl (really!).  I like order to my colours.  I also love rainbows and colourwash.  Soooo, my first step is to sort my scraps.

Then I plan to make my crumb blocks all one colour, with maybe a few flecks of a complimentary colour to make them sparkle.  So I'll have a blue block made up of little crumbs of my different blue scraps with maybe a scrap or two of orange.  A purple block with a spark of orange, a green block with pink.  Sashing?  A cream perhaps, maybe black.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  First I have to go pick up my leftovers!

Anyone else doing a crumb quilt at the moment?  Or tell me what you are doing with your scraps - I'd love some more inspiration to use them up.