I’ve been talking about making a scrappy quilt for ages,years in fact, my scrap stash is getting a bit ridiculous! I currently have six of those IKEA cubes pretty full of scraps! I’m reorganising my sewing room at the moment and I could really do with getting it down to two boxes, so I guess I’d better get quilting!

I was thinking of doing a half square triangle quilt when I spotted the finished Bloomtopia quilt by Pat Sloan. It was a free quilt-a-long which has now finished, but all the patterns are still on the website. This also means I can go at my own pace without feeling any pressure.

Rather than completely, randomly scrappy, I’m hoping to use mainly the blue, green, purple, pink sort of colour range. I was going to try and unify it with one background fabric, until I saw how much you needed, I would have had to go out to buy some which somewhat defeats the object of a scrappy quilt! So I’ve set myself the restriction of using from the scrap boxes if poss, but for bigger blocks, a fat quarter which has been in my stash for ages is permissable!!

The first week pattern was for two blocks. I tackled the butterfly one first. Pat used the same fabric for the wings and the body, I decided to use one scrap for all the bodies. The background was left over from my Coming Home and Staying Home quilts.

The second one was fairly simple with just half square triangles and squares, I didn’t have enough fabric to fussy cut but one raccoon worked out perfectly! These are both 12.5″ square. The background for this one was left over from some bunting I made a few years ago.

I went straight on to the block for the next week. This time there was one big block – it’s 18.5 x 20.5″, with three lovely big flowers. If I used two different pinks I had just enough fabric to make the three flowers. The background was a fat quarter, which I only just squeezed it out of – and I mean only just! One set of flying geese was stitched wrong, to replace the rectangle I had to use two strips!! Print direction went out of the window, but luckily it’s the sort of print where it doesn’t matter.

So far it’s all going together nicely and I’m getting the hang of this scrap business – they look pretty good together. I’ve just got rather a lot to use before my sewing room is in order!!