Scrap, scrap, scrappin' along

After finishing up several gift quilts lately, I decided to just play in my scraps for a while. My blue/aqua box of scrap strips was overflowing, so that was a good place to start. I was inspired by a couple quilts I saw on Pinterest to make some 60 degree string triangles.

I raided my "light neutrals" scrap box, too, and made strip sets going from light to dark. Each set is about 9" wide and about 40-45". I had a few single pieces that were WOF, but most of the strips were pieced end to end in similar color and value as you can see. 

I read somewhere that your strip piecing will stay much straighter if you press the seams open instead of to one side. That was definitely true with these random, leftover scrap strips. Here's two sewn together. Note that big bow in the piecing.

After setting the seam then pressing it open, the bow completely disappeared. Magic, huh? Please excuse my well-used and rather scorched ironing board cover. I love that bird print, but it needs to be retired soon. 

After making the strip sets, I trimmed them all to 8.5" width and started cutting triangles. 8.5" is the maximum size I can cut with this ruler. I'm lazy, and wanted to cut and piece as few triangles as possible. Because the sets ended up all chopped up, having pieced strips was no big deal. You can see in this photo that half the triangles have a dark base, and half have a light base. I also ended up with those right angle triangle end pieces, which I saved.

I tried to keep the true blues and the aquas in separate strip sets, and ended up with four distinct sets of triangles. Completely by accident, the aqua strips had less white/cream, so they read as more uniformly colored than the true blues and the true blues have a more distinct pattern of light and dark.

I wanted to sash between each of the four sections and decided to go bold. GOLD bold! I've admired a number of scrappy quilts lately that have very patterned, brightly colored backgrounds. I pulled out an oddball dark yellow/gold with a red and blue paisley motif, and it spoke to me. It whispered, "Yo, Louise, it's a completely scrappy quilt! That's like completely free fabric right there, so try something new, why doncha? Who cares that might look like a circus tent when you're done? Don't be such a wuss. What have you got to lose?" Not exactly reassuring words, but when the fabric speaks, you gotta listen.

Here is that gold at the end of two rows, filling in the space at the end of the triangles. I only had a yard of it, so my sashing and borders needed to be skinny minnie to make it work. 

And here's the finished flimsy. The gold is kinda weird, but a good weird, I think. The triangles have a nice 3-D effect. There are lot of fun bits of fabric in there: cats, butterflies, hearts, birds and fish to name a few. It's pretty big for me, about 60"x70", which makes a nice couch or lap quilt size. Still, a bit more width in the sashing would have been nice.

Have you ever used a really off the wall fabric for background or sashing? Did you hem and haw about it first, or dive right in? Did it whisper to you, and if so, did it have a New Jersey accent? Weird.