The Purple Quilt is done. It’s a cosy couch quilt size.

This one makes me feel competent. The strip sequence came out nicely, and the newer way of binding went well. I like the colour combination.

The back is a brushed cotton plaid.

“Stitch in the ditch” on every second row seems to work just as nicely as every row and takes half the time and thread. If I was to make another quilt, out of those blue leftovers, I’d do another one of these strip quilts.

It turns out I’ve been doing binding wrong. Well, not the usual way for quilts. I’m supposed to be making a wide strip, ironing it in half, sewing the raw edges to the back of the quilt, then folding it over to to the front and sewing it down. I’ve been making a narrower strip, sewing one raw edge to the back, folding the other edge over then sewing it to the front.

I tried this new method and it is slightly easier. However, I forgot which side of the quilt I was supposed to be sewing it to first, and wound up having to hand stitch it down. Never mind. I do quite enjoy hand stitching, even if it sets my back off.

Here’s the back of the quilt:

Here’s another shot of the front:

It’s far from perfect. On the other side of the galaxy from perfect. But I actually finished it, which I doubted more times than I can count. I’m calling it the ‘learner quilt’.

…is done.

When I started, all these boxes were full of flannelette strips and some uncut fabric:

And this is what I have left:

Whatever I do with the leftovers, it’s not going to be quilts. I might make fabric-wrapped rope baskets from it. I might made fabric pompoms. I might use it as stuffing. I might just send it all to fabric recycling.

What I do know, is that a bag of scrap fabric can go a loooooong way. That huge bag of flannelette pieces I bought for $100 in early 2020 became five woven floor rugs and nine quilts from knee to double bed size. And that’s after a third of pieces were culled at the beginning because they weren’t the right size and shape to become strips.

I won’t be buying random bags of fabric again!

I also won’t be making flannelette floor rugs again. There’s too much time spent ironing the strips to conceal the raw edges, and I don’t think my body (or even my loom) is up for the pounding of the beater to get a tight rug. That’s fine, because I have three big rugs in my storage chest ready for when the one I’m using wears out, which is probably a lifetime’s supply considering how good the current one looks.

I might make a flannelette quilt again. The fabric does make a cushy quilt. But it wouldn’t be a big one.

I’d like to try making a ‘normal’ cotton fabric quilt one day. But not for some time, I think. I’ve had enough of quilting. It’s time to get back to the sewing I meant to do before all this started.

But wait, I hear you say. What about the topstitching and binding of all those unfinished quilts? Well, I decided I only had to get the flannelette strips made into quilt tops by the end of summer. My plan after that is to tackle finishing one quilt a month, and hopefully have them all done by the end of the year.

I was a bit fed up with the numerous problems this quilt kept throwing at me, and tempted to pack it away for a while, but I knew I’d probably forget how I was fixing the rows of blocks so I had to get that part done. To preserve my will to live, and because the Sew Mini was old and I didn’t want to overheat it, I also decided to fix no more than one row of blocks at a time. I got distracted by the Purple Quilt top, but once that was done I returned to the blue quilt and finished the last three rows of blocks one hot Sunday when I just wanted easy, brainless sewing to do.

Then I did put it aside. Using a walking foot would make the topstitching much neater, and I didn’t think the one I had would fit the Juno. Instead, I made the Square Cat Quilt and Crayon Quilt.

That left me with this:

The leftovers from the Blue Quilt.

And everything else.

I didn’t want to do anything with the blue leftovers it until I’d finished the blue quilt in case I wanted to add more sashing and patchwork to the sides. The mixed leftovers batch didn’t inspire me. Not even the skull-themed fabric strips. I was almost left with nothing to work on.

But then the Juki was back and working beautifully. I launched into finishing the Blue Quilt. The quilt-as-you-go method is designed to lesson the time you spend wrestling a big, heavy quilt. But the more you add, the bigger it gets and in the final stage you do have a big, heavy quilt to deal with. During the break I’d had an idea to lesson the strain. Instead of just adding rows of blocks and it getting bigger and bigger, I could work from both sides simultaneously, creating two smaller sections that would be joined at the middle. Only when the middle section had to be top-stitched would it be a PITA to handle.

To add the middle section, I sewed it onto one already quilted part, then sewed the other side of the top onto the other already quilted part, then hand stitched the backing in place.

Then I just had to top stitch it. Yeah. What a monster. I had to unpick nearly half of it and sew from the other end to try and smooth it out, but I tell you, if there were quilt exams this one would get an F-.

But it was assembled at last.

And I hadn’t needed to put aside the blue batch of leftover strips. There wasn’t any way I was going to wrestle the monster Blue Quilt a minute longer. Well, except for the binding, but that’s another story.

When I considered what quilt to make next, I considered the leftover strips and asked myself what I would hate to toss out. My eyes went to the crayon and psychedelic fabric, and the uncut pieces of fabric with feathers and cat-in-a-garden designs.

I started playing and found myself making borders around a white square. I’d seen this method of building blocks in videos, and it looked simple and fast. I began matching solid coloured strips and chose three that matched well, and I was ready to start the construction.

I began with the squares, which I fussy cut. I wasn’t able to get one of the types of cat cut from the fabric and managed 8 squares. But when I laid them out it seemed obvious that a 3×3 grid would work best. So I cut around the cat an appliquéd it to a square cut from a plain garden part of the fabric.

Next I laid out coloured strips for borders. Then I took three of the multicoloured fabrics I liked – feathers, dots and psychedelic stripes – and added the next round of borders. Then more colour, and sashing in white.

And I got sewing.

I’m calling this the Square Cat Quilt

I really enjoyed the patchworking method, so I decided to do another quilt using it. This one used the crayon, dotty and thick stripe rainbow fabric cut across not along the stripes. I was able to make twelve blocks before I ran out of fabric.

This became the Crayon Quilt

At this point, I was also spending time cutting backing, batting and allocating fabric for binding. By the time I finished the second squares and borders quilt, I had five quilt sandwiches ready for top stitching. Add to that the Blue Quilt, which used the quilt-as-you-go method, and I had six quilts to finish.

And one or maybe two more quilt tops to make before I was done for the summer.

So, thanks partly to the Juki requiring a service and repair, I have a new machine.

I’d had a shop web page for it bookmarked for many months – maybe even a year – as a machine for taking to friends’ houses or lessons. When the Juki started eating needles I checked on the web page and to my delight it was on sale, reduced by 33%.

So the Sew Mini went back in the cupboard and I put the Juno to work. Oh, it was nice to have a variable speed foot pedal again!

I turned my attention to the batch of striped fabric strips. I discovered three things: firstly, I had leftovers from the Snakes & Ladders quilt already sewn together; secondly, the overall combination of stripe patterns didn’t combine that nicely; thirdly, it also contained some uncut pieces of fabrics.

Regarding the already sewn pieces, some were in pairs, some were several pairs sewn together in a short column. They were of similar widths so if all the pairs were joined I would have a longer column. Four of the fabrics – about half of them – were a combination of strips cut along and across the stripes, and could be sewn together the same way. I could do a column of each, then join them all together with a strip of white between. So I did that.

It’s a good knee rug size.