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.

You might remember the Wake Me Up quiltalong that Emma Jansen ran during Melbourne’s first lockdown.  She ran another for her Whirligig quilt pattern during Melbourne’s second lockdown.  I chose to make the largest size, working with fabrics that were already in my quilting stash. Most of my quilting fabrics were bought when I first discovered sewing and quilting blogs. They date between 2007 to around 2012. Many of these fabrics were bought with the eye of a garment sewer more than the eye of a quilter, and that creates it’s own challenges when trying to make effective quilt tops. This pattern uses a decent amount of solid as a background, so I figured that I could make it work without having the issue of not enough value and contrast difference that I had with the quilt top I made in the first quiltalong.

I ran into a problem when making this quilt top – because I ran out of the white solid fabric that I was using for the background. I had a couple of other white fabrics in stash, but they weren’t the same white. There are so many variations in shade! Luckily, Cutting Cloth is in my 5km lockdown travel radius, so I was able to do a contactless drop off of the leftover solid fabric for them to match. Another metre was all that I needed to be able to complete the quilt top. While I was waiting for the additional solid, Emma had fun playing with the photos of the blocks that I’d shared on social media to see how they might look in a finished quilt.

This photoshopped quilt really inspired me to keep going and get this quilt top finished – I knew that it would be so pretty! And here is the actual finished result.

Each block is slightly different, and I have oriented each one to keep the windmills turning. As you can tell, it’s a decent size! I have now pieced together backing, using as much of the leftover fabric from the quilt front as possible plus some of the non-matching white solid that was in my stash and some more fabrics that coordinated. I’ve also cut the binding. It’s getting closer to it being a finished quilt!  I plan to quilt this myself on my domestic machine, and have been watching some Craftsy classes to refresh my memory on how to quilt.  I’ve took a couple of classes on it years ago, but I am definitely in need of practice.

Finishing off some quilt tops a couple of months ago reignited my interest in patchwork and quilting.  When Emma Jansen started a sewalong I was powerless to resist!  I really like simple quilts where the arrangement of print and colour creates secondary patterns.  Her Wake Me Up quilt is a perfect example.

The first step – and in many ways, the most important – is to choose your fabrics. I had plenty of fabrics in stash, but discovered that although they were in a variety of colours, they were pretty much all medium tones. There wasn’t much at all that was dark in colour, and even less that was light. I eventually decided that I would have to focus on different colours in my quilt top, and narrowed my options down to these ones.

I decided to do the smaller throw sized quilt top. The next step was cutting out all the squares. Thank goodness for a quilting mat, quilting rules and a fresh new blade in the rotary cutter!

Then over to the machine to chain piece half square triangles. I have to admit that I am not very competent with using patchwork tricks and techniques that can considerably speed up the whole process, but am starting to give it a go.

So now I had all the basic elements to put the quilt blocks together! There are two basic block shapes in this quilt top – a cross block:

And a ‘circle’ block.

There are also ‘part’ blocks that go along the edges of the quilt top. Emma does give another construction method for this quilt for those that prefer to work across rows with the same type of block, which I suspect is possibly a faster construction method. I did these blocks slowly, with bits of chain piecing but most just constructing one row of each block at a time. Then I laid all the blocks out on the spare bed, trying to vary the placement of the different fabrics as much as possible between block, but not always succeeding. Then I sewed them all together! Ta-da!

The finished quilt top is pretty, but really suffers from having too many fabrics in the same depth of colour.  You can see how well those darker ‘circle’ block centres pop.  If the grey fabrics had been much lighter you’d have a much better sense of the other interlocking shapes and secondary patterns that make up this quilt top.  Do take a look at the many marvellous and varied creations on Instagram to see just how terrific it can look.  This quilt top is now with the rest of the pile of quilt tops waiting to become quilts.  I’ve located backing fabric in my stash (it might require a little pieceing) and that’s now on my to-do list.  Time to get back to garment sewing for a while!