Modern Scrappy Quilts

Buying 45 fat quarters in a set just doesn't seem reasonable. How will you ever use them up? In our case, my husband and I found a pack at a surplus store, and we just couldn't resist the price.

Modern quilts present a variety of opportunities for designing your own pattern to use up scraps. Because they are not based on traditional blocks, you can use the fabric you have in many ad hoc ways.

This is the first quilt that my husband made from the pack. He loves modern quilts and had been eyeing this type of plus sign pattern for some time. We had seen some variations of it in modern quilting. We have a die cutter, so the charm squares didn't slow him down much, but laying it out took some time.

Now, what to do with the leftovers? I measured the largest pieces of what was left and determined that we could cut rectangles of roughly 16.5 inches by 6 inches. Because modern quilts tend to have large amounts of negative space, the white wasn't a problem, but how do we introduce bright colors? Looking through our pattern books of modern quilts, we came across a theme of using a bright band. Because I also had a partial jelly roll of batik, it seemed like a perfect match. My husband created the pattern by synthesizing some of the patterns and using the measurements that he needed for the size of the rectangles.

There was still a huge pile of scraps left! What to do next? This time I started sorting the scraps by color and then by size. With a little help from a white background, I found that I could lay out the squares and rectangles in a sort of log cabin pattern. Looking at each square carefully, you can see it's not really a log cabin, but you might be able to tell that I began with two parallel rectangles and then added one along the end. If the one along the end didn't fit, I added a little white as needed. Then I laid out a second row of each and so forth until I had squares of a standard size.

I realized that this was still going to be a boring quilt. It would be a donation quilt, so perfection wasn't an issue, but I did need to add another technique to make it pop a little. A quilter had recently taught "magic inch" at our Bee meeting. Using the leftovers from the batik jelly roll, I added this technique to some of the squares.

For those not familiar with "magic inch", this technique uses a piece of fabric exactly an inch wide. Cut the rectangle anywhere you wish and sew in the inch of fabric. Because of the quarter inch seams, the 1 inch comes out exactly right! You have ½ inch for the seams and ½ inch left to take the place of what you took out. This technique doesn't change the size of the original piece and can be used just about anywhere.

Oh yes, I still have some smaller scraps left. I'm sure they will show up somewhere!