I love a good scrappy quilt. There are some quilters who are just masters at making them. I'm no master, but the more I quilt, the more I find myself writing my patterns with a scrappy variation and making my own scrappy version. I love the variety of colors and prints a scrappy quilt gives.
The benefit of a scrap friendly pattern is the pattern is already written with the modification for using scraps. But you can make almost any quilt scrappy from any pattern.
Scrappy sewing means you can go into your stash, or your scrap bin and find the fabric you need without going to the fabric store. I've been working hard on sewing through my stash, so maybe that is why I've been leaning toward scrappy quilting in the last year.
Here are a couple tips if you're thinking of making your own scrappy quilt:
- If you are a beginner quilter then I suggest using a pattern which is written for a scrappy quilt. It will make the process easier for you. The other option is modifying a pattern not meant for scraps. This is totally doable, it just takes more time and would be frustrating for a beginner quilter.
- Decide how scrappy you want your quilt to be. Do you want just the background to be scrappy or all fabrics? Below you can see an example of three different quilts. The first (Kailia's Quilt) is made using all scraps. The second (Samina's Stars Quilt) was made following the directions for the accent fabrics and just replacing the background fabric with a variety of fabrics. The third (Patchwork Jubilee) was made with both the background and accent fabrics scrappy.
- Do you want uniformity to your scraps? When I made the Samina's Stars Quilt (above) I knew I wanted to replace the background fabric to make it scrappy. But I also wanted it to be subtle. So I made sure to choose fabrics which were all in the same cream tones and had small to light colored patterns on them. When I made the Patchwork Jubilee Pattern scrappy and chose the background I wanted a more noticeable scrappy look. So I choose white, light pinks, off whites, and cream fabrics. I also chose fabrics with larger prints on them, including black and darker colors. It gives the background fabric a different look than if I had chosen all low volume prints.
- Decide if you want to have any organization to your scrappy quilt. For instance you can see the rainbow Kailia's Quilt (1st pic below) has obvious organization which meant making sure I had enough fabrics of each color. For the Patchwork Jubilee (2nd image below) I went through my scraps first and figured out which colors I had a lot of, in this case yellow and pinks. Then, I decided how many blocks of each color I could make and where to put them diagonally in the quilt. The fabrics with the least scraps I put in the corners (in this case dark blue and green).
- Sometimes if I'm short on a color I need I'll dive into my stash and use older fabrics which I don't love as much anymore but will still go well in the quilt. I don't mind cutting these up and using them gradually in different projects.
I'm realizing every time I make a scrappy version of one of my patterns it turns out to be my favorite quilt. So I'm sure there will be a lot more in the future.
You can find the quilt patterns for the quilts above in my shop.