Drift Away {In Scraps}

It's hard to deny -- I love scrap quilts! Over the last few years, I've made quite a few quilts that were made entirely (or nearly entirely) from fabric from my stash (like Pinwheel Plus, Sunset Gathering, Summer Solstice, Meadow, and my two Blue in Bloom quilts, to name a few!)

I'm now in a place where my fabric yardage and bundles are dwindling, and I have scads and scads of fabric that fall into the scraps-to-large-scraps category. Now that my Top Spin and On Ringo Lake quilts are finished, and my Double Delight and Donuts projects are ready to be put together into finished tops (with the help of a trip to the store!), it's time to embark on a new scrappy project.

Somewhat by serendipity, Melissa of Happy Quilting released her Drift Away pattern and I knew it was perfect for my green, teal, and blue fabrics that didn't get used in my Donuts quilt. Rather than use fat quarters, I used a variety of sizes of scraps, many of which were leftover chunks from backings, to cut the squares needed for this project. I also decided on using black for the background since I had a large chunk of it on hand.

In this picture, the smallest size squares are already sewn into pairs, but I can still pick out lots of recognizable fabrics from older projects! The plaid on the left was the backing for Racing Rails, the teal dot was the backing for Sunset Gathering, the olive and aqua leaf is from my Midnight mystery quilt, and the squiggle is from Beau's Ties.

One of the reasons I decided to go with black instead of a light solid is because the fabrics I used have both whites and off-whites in the prints.

I managed to get a significant part of the first corner together rather quickly! I didn't lay out the entire quilt at once so I just started randomly pulling the medium and large sized focus squares from their piles. I have two different fabrics for the large setting triangles, so I am alternating them.

So far I think my "place-the-squares-as-you-go" plan is going quite well. I only had to take out one or two seams where I sewed units upside down. Only a few rows to go until I'm halfway done with the quilt top! This quilt as designed ends up at 80" square -- I'm strongly considering adding a border on all four sides so that it would end up full/queen sized since I may give this as a gift. But those are things to decide another day!

Sharing at Needle and Thread Thursday!