Friday, July 18, 2014

Purge Progress

Rachel over at Stitched in Color is hosting "The Purge".  She is encouraging us to do something with our un-loved fabrics, fabrics that we once loved but have fallen out of love with for one reason or another.  Well, a couple of months ago I already did a purge by taking all my unwanted fabric to my quilt guild meeting and let the ladies pick and choose from what they wanted. What ever they didn't want went to goodwill. So I don't really have unloved fabrics for this project, but I do have 12 bins of odd sized scraps that needed purging.
I still love all of these fabrics, but they can definitely use a purging in a good way.  They are a mix of left over pieces from quilt backings, scraps given to me by friends, and leftovers from my own craft projects. Some are slightly bigger than a fat quarter, others are extremely long 5 to 10 inch strips.  Because of their odd shapes, there isn't a spot for them in my fabric storage system and since I don't want to cut them up into smaller strips they get folded and put into these bins and shoe boxes.

I have started to organize them by color and have even pulled out some and placed them next to my color yardage, but a lot of them are novelty fabrics from when I was making cutesy baby quilts and bags to go with them and they don't seem to fit into a specific color category, so for my purge I am going to dive into these bins and make some charity quilts for the kids in our community. Hopefully by the end of the purge I can throw away some empty shoe boxes.

I started out by pulling out anything that would look good in a boy quilt.  I ended up using all animal prints and decided to use the Color Brick pattern that Rachel used for her beginner Quilt a long.   


I used a smaller brick dimension so I could keep the quilt small for a little boy.  My bricks finish at 4 x 8 inches. My sashing measures half an inch and the borders are 1.5 inches.
I had enough brinks to make two small quilts.


The sashing is a purge also. It is a Kona Solid that I bought for the Kona blog hop I participated in, but I ended up not using it for the hop. Luckily it has turned out to be the perfect color for my brick mortar.

 I cut out two more bricks to finish the second top and then I cut up all the leftover animal fabric into different sized squares ranging from 4.5 inches all the way down to 1.5 inches. I cut up every bit of blue and green animal print from those bins.  I didn't see much dent in the bins, but it still feels good knowing that I have used up several pieces of fabric and that I have scrappy squares already cut for another quick quilt.


Check out the link at Stitched in Color to see how everyone else's purge is going.


=^..^=


4 comments:

  1. It's lovely that you're using these scraps to make charity quilts, they will be perfect for little boys. And well done on purging!

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  2. Thanks for the great idea! I have been wanting to do some purging and donation quilts and this post has sent me in the right direction! Love your posts.

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  3. Most of my scraps are odd-sized, too, or larger pieces with chunks cut out of them! You have given me some good ideas. Love the charity quilts.

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  4. I just found your blog and love it. I had some of the fabric in this quilt - the one with the colorful zoo animals. I made a dress for my GD to start Kindergarten out of it. She's now 25. The rest of the fabric has gone in scraps quilts that everyone got with that fabric and other fabrics from clothes I made for them. They say they are their treasures. My daughter cried when she got hers.

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