I think that I mentioned a couple of blog posts ago that I’ve been spending time in the sewing room organising and tidying.  The entire process was kicked off when I decided that I really needed to progress my many quilt tops and tidy up the quilting section of my sewing room cupboard. One of the first boxes that I pulled out was full of Japanese fabric squares that I had collected from Kimono House some years ago. My original plan for these squares was to turn them into a Japanese Kaleidoscope quilt, which is entirely hand-stitched. I looked at them, acknowledged that the hand-stitched quilt was never likely to eventuate, and began to turn them into a Value quilt.

There are some wonderful examples of Value quilts on the internet and Instagram. They all follow the same principle of using the value – how light or dark a colour/print is – to form the overall design, rather than the actual colour. Looking at the fabrics in greyscale really highlights it.

I sorted the squares into three piles of light, medium and dark fabrics. Then sewed them into half-square triangle blocks. After that they were trimmed to be exactly the same size.

Then I started playing with layouts. Here are some of the ones that I experimented with.

I really wanted to use all of my blocks, so in the end I went with the last one of the three layouts above which utilised every single one of them. I didn’t agonise too much over this project; it was all experimentation and play. I was aiming for done, rather than perfect! Time to sew them all together and see how the final product looked.

Ta-da! Done. Let’s take a look in greyscale.

This quilt top is pretty small. I’ve since added a border to it, which you can glimpse in the next photo.

After sewing the Value quilt I pulled out every single quilt top that I have, along with whatever batting that I could find, and started piecing together backs for each quilt. I wanted to use stash fabrics only for this, and was able to put together a back for each one from both the scraps left over from sewing up the front, plus coordinating fabrics that were already in the cupboard. Some of the quilt backs took many hours to piece together, and I think that they look like modern improvised quilts in their own right! I also cut binding for each quilt. Now I have two quilts all basted ready to quilt, and more with the quilt top/back/binding all ready to go once I have more batting. There are two quilt tops that need my Mum’s sewing machine and it’s lovely little embroidery stitches to finish off. I feel that I’ve made loads of progress toward turning all these quilt tops into quilts.

The next thing that I did was ferret through my scrap bin and cut all the scraps into squares – either 2.5″, 3.5″ or 6.5″. These are now pre-cuts, just waiting to become quilts once there are enough. I still have another shelf to sort through and cut up in a similar fashion (maybe I need some strips as well as squares). I feel that this will be really effective quilting stash management for me – thanks to Kellie from Cutting Cloth for sharing how she’s managing her leftovers. Basically, after you’ve cut out a project, turn the scraps into useable pieces such as pre-cuts.

Of course, I couldn’t just leave these squares in nice piles, and decided to turn some of the 2.5″ squares into a scrap quilt top, by mixing them with a small amount of quilting cotton solid that was also in my stash.

I had cut out enough 2.5″ squares from the solid to make thirty blocks. So more decisions! How should I arrange them? I wanted to sash them, but the amount of solid was quite limited. I popped a photo up on Instagram, and Stacy suggested that I add cornerstones. Excellent idea! So this is what I ended up with.

There wasn’t enough of the solid for another row of sashing (and cornerstones) around the outside, which would have been my preference. But this is still pretty sweet! I have enough fabric in stash to back it, and have cut a striped fabric for binding. It will be a cute knee rug, all from scraps/stash.

Now the quilt tops/backs/binding are all folded ready for quilting. I also did a huge tidy of my sewing room, finally clearing out the ‘kids craft cupboard’ and rearranging many of my supplies in more useful, easy to access ways. I think it’s time to sew a couple more garments, then pull the sewing table/cabinet out, put it in to quilting mode and get cracking. I’d like to finish off this blog post by sharing this amazing quilt that my sister-in-law recently completed. Jeanette has only started to sew garments and quilts in the past couple of years, and she’s absolutely fearless! She imagines something that she’d like to make, and just goes for it. It’s awesome.  That’s her mum (my mother-in-law) Adri you can see holding it in the photo below; she’s really enjoying doing craft with her daughter since recently moving to Melbourne.