Crazy Quilting

I had another one of my impulsive project urges at the weekend. I suddenly felt the need to do a little bit of machine quilting, using the fabrics bought at the Spring Quilting show at Ardingly. I've always thought it is lovely to see how everyone has an innate style, personal favourite colours and patterns that you always buy and somehow fit into your collection so that all of the fabrics work together as a team.

Blue is my colour, and I have a lot of blue/turquoise, blue/purple, blue/green fabrics in my collection, punctuated every so often with hot pinks and deeper, berry like colours. I don't tend to collect oranges, browns or yellows, although try and force myself to as they will often go very well to create colour clashes with blue.

I thought that the best way to test my 'collection' would be to jumble the colours up and create some crazy quilt squares. I cut roughly two strips at 2.5inches wide from each of the fat quarters, and laid them out to create a kind of rainbow. The Mother said it was like creating my own jelly roll pack.

The start of every crazy quilt square has to begin with a centre shape, usually a pentagon (five sided shape) which I cut out separately using a template I drew myself- it's super easy, you just need a ruler and pencil and away you go.

For Christmas The Mother bought me a special kind of sewing foot for my machine, a 1/4 inch foot! Essentially it just has a little piece of plastic fixed to the side of the foot which stops the fabric edges going out further than a 1/4 inch and it works a treat! There were some very neat seams happening.

The strips get sewn around the pentagon shape, one at a time, with right sides together. After each strip is stitched, it has to be pressed back and trimmed to keep the edges nice and neat. You just keep going round and round and round until you get to the size you want.

When your stitched piece is big enough to fit whatever size of square or shape you want it to be, then you simply trim the edges away and voila! My squares are 12 inches as that was the size of the ruler I was using with my rotary cutter.

I made six out of the fabric that I pre-cut, although have plans to make some more the next time I feel the need to stitch something on the machine. It is so easy, you can use up odds and ends, it doesn't have to be specially cut fabrics, or different colours- each square could be completely different with different fabrics used each time. I really like how these colours work together so am looking forwards to creating a final quilt top out of them.

They also all turned out differently. Even though the inital shape was exactly the same, by the time you finish the strips are all in different places.

I think I will add some white or cream sashing around the squares before stitching them together to break the colours up slightly and give them a nice border. For now they are just living as cool, colourful squares!