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Friday, June 8, 2012

A CQ Scrap Experiment

I was lucky at Empty Spools to visit the classroom of Susan Carlson...you all know her work, she is amazing.  Her collaged fabric quilts are fabulous...just think "pink rhinoceros" and you know who I mean!

Watching her students working and collaging their fabrics made me wonder why I couldn't adapt the method to crazy quilting.  Experimental crazy quilting....

Why not just adhere my scraps onto foundation with a little bit of glue?

You can see the scale here is quite small.  My foundation muslin is 6 1/2" X 10 1/2".
These scraps are the little precious bits from my Moon over Hood project that I could not throw away.

They are all laid out with overlapping edges...but just held in place with a little glue in the center of each patch.  The edges of the fabrics are trimmed, but raw.
This was obviously quite fast.

The real experiment was to find out how adding machine embroidery on the seams--in crazy quilt fashion--would look, and how well it would secure the edges of the fabrics.

I think it worked great!!!
I used Aurofil machine threads in a size #12, and some of the built in stitches on my old Pfaff machine....nothing fancy. 

For a quick project using your precious scraps, this is pretty darn fun.  Try it, you'll like it!

13 comments:

  1. As soon as I read the title I though "What fun" I love raw edge work. I taught a class a few years ago and a traditional quilter just was not too sure about just leaving the edges raw and I reassured her not to worry, the bead embellishment would cover it, hold down the fabric and the few stray strands of unraveled fabric would be fine.

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  2. I'm doing something similar... I zigzagged the raw edges with a neutral thread and now I'm embroidering over the edges by hand. :-)

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  3. That looks like a lot of fun and I have a lot of scraps ;-)

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  4. Another great quick way to do this is to use apiece of Fast-2-Fuse ll. It is tacky and you can pop down the fabrics on one fpeeled side of the sheet of interfacing and not have to use wet glue. then you can carry the whole thing over to the iron without everything blowing all over the room. lightly tack things down with the iron and keep going . then once the 8 x 10 sheet is covered peel off the other backing paper from the reverse side and adhere the whole thing to a foundation fabric. Fun Fun!!! And yet ANOTHER reason to not throw anything away EVER again!!!

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  5. Nice! The science teacher in me loves an experiment! Anonymous's comment gave me an idea for another experiment: Could you set the stitch length of your zigzag to act as a guide to evenly space your hand stitches?
    I like Elizabeth's suggestion, too!Hurray for crafty women! Thank you, Allie!

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  6. I have tried this technique by accident. The first time I tried crazy quilting I just decided to use a glue stick. I'm too lazy to do something that is probably the correct thing [but would take too much effort!] so I always cut corners [sorry about the pun :(]

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  7. I think, when it's all said and done, you could write the book...A 1,001 Ways to Make a Crazy Quilt...

    Thank you for introducing me to Susan Carlson. I am having a lot of fun getting to know her. Hope you are having fun and coming to the East Coast soon...

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  8. This looks like a great way to use those small pieces of precious fabrics. Thank you for sharing the idea

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  9. How fun! Do yu have a favorite kind of glue?

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  10. Just last week I pulled all of my trim scraps from the trash and stitched them to a foundation. I like the way you've done it, with the glue tack.
    Now no scrap is too small. oh, dear! Too much fun!!! :)

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  11. I'm in.... I've been too lazy to start, maybe this will kick me into gear to get into the crazy quilt stage. I've been a cq stalker for too long! I've been hording fine beautiful fabric's f o r e v e r....
    now's the time. Think I will call my SIL and get us going!
    Thank you for the idea's ladies!

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  12. Looks like your experiment worked out well. A great trick for using special scraps :)

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