Applique for cheats

I have just finished my first hand appliquéd quilt…without doing a stitch of appliqué. Clever me!A few months back, a trip to the Arts Recycling Centre coincided with a delivery of donated quilt materials. The delivery resulted from the clean-out of the local Quilt Guild’s back room, and a decision to get rid of “old-fashioned” donated blocks.

Not knowing this, I gathered up the quilt blocks from the ARC and ran back to our Guild, announcing I had intercepted a whole lot of blocks, and could we use them at our upcoming charity quilt event. After the committee member had a good laugh, I got to actually keep the blocks and fabric I had intercepted. All for the princely sum of $4.10.

Quilt #1 from the ARC fabrics and blocks.

This little quilt is the fourth block I have re-purposed from the dozen or so blocks I intercepted, the others being made into cushions and a quilt.

I surrounded the block with a selection of the 2 1/2 inch squares I had cut months ago from the intercepted fabric. I spent several weeks washing, ironing, and cutting, to transform the pile of dusty scraps to fabric squares of a useable size. Given a charm pack is $25 at my LQS, it seemed worth the effort to make my own charm squares. After several weeks of hard labour, $25 didn’t seem such a bad investment after all!

Stash enhancement by adopting unwanted fabric, especially browns, is a public service to the quilting community.

I used a Centennial Solid I purchased from Hancocks of Paducah for the border of the quilt. Brown is not usually my favourite colour, but this one is the shade of rich, dark chocolate. I am on a chocolate fast, so anything chocolate is looking good at the moment.

I also used an extra puffy polyester batting for the first time, since I imagined this as a baby play mat. I started some hand stitching around the main appliqué, but the batting was simply too thick, so switched to machine quilting using my walking foot. While my free-motion foot has now come out of it’s wrapper, we are still not well acquainted.

Bit hard to see the stitching since it’s raining. That or I did a magnificent job of thread matching!

I kept the quilting to a minimum, since I want the quilt to stay bouncy and soft.  I stitched around some of the main components, and the inside of the leaves. The extra thick batting made putting on a binding a little more difficult, and one corner is a complete train-wreck, but babies aren’t usually too fussy about these things. The quilt ended up 36 x 28 inches in size, hopefully big enough for a newborn to play on, if not a bigger baby.

This quilt is off with last weeks effort to a local charity, if they want it. I haven’t actually approached them yet. In the meantime I shall enjoy my garden and plot my next finish.

Linking up eventually with Scraptastic Tuesday,  WIP Wednesday, and Lets Bee Social.

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