Scrap Vortex

Somewhere in my travels I came across a quilt along for the Scrap Vortex.  Go check out the quilt along for more instructions on making your own scarp vortex quilt.  Amanda Jean over at Crazy Mom Quilts has some wonderful tutorials and walks you through working with your scraps for the Scrap Vortex.

I've been using my crumbs to make stacks and stacks of 4.5" blocks.  If you want to make some of these yourself I recommend you check out Victoria Findlay Wolfe's 15 Minutes of Play.  The book is wonderful and gives you so many ideas of how to work with your scraps to make some really amazing things.

I pulled out my stacks and stacks of 4.5" squares and got to work.  Two shoeboxes full of these little suckers. It was time to make something.

I wanted some places to rest the eye so I made some groups of blocks and framed them with 2.5" strips.  I used different sizes of groups for each one.  Since the border for these units made the blocks 4.5" bigger in both length and width they fit perfectly into the rest of the blocks with minimal adjustments and zero partial seams.

I chose the finished size of this quilt based on the size of the backing I had available.  This year I have restricted myself to buying only backing fabrics and I've been really successful with not growing my stash this year and still making loads of finished quilts.

Some of the framed units aren't as obvious as others.  If I do this again I will pay much closer attention to these and try to make them stand out more.

The turquoise frame is the most obvious.  This might be because of this is the only solid or due to the blocks in and around it.

A scrappy quilt like this deserves more than one color quilting thread.  I pulled some Magnifico, OMNI and So Fine #50 and got stitching.  Each of these threads is great for long arm quilting.

Basted and ready to quilt.  Since this quilt has so many things going on, I decided to use a different motif in different areas and let the bobbin tell me when to change color of thread.

The Flower Power design from Angela Walters is always a great filler.  I know this is in one of her books but I've packed up all my books for the move so I can't pull it out and let you know which one it is.  I also used echoing a great deal.

Free-hand baptist fans are another great filler.

Pebbles!  They aren't my favorite, but I'm glad I included them.  A little bit of ruler-work there in the block.  It isn't anything spectacular, though.

This was my first real try with the ribbon meander.  I really like the effect.

I used this as an opportunity to practice my feathers.  Some are better than others.

The back of the quilt gives a better idea of the different colors of thread used.  This backing fabric is a dark blue flannel.

The purple and blue threads are pretty well hidden.  The yellow, orange, read and white are not so hidden.

The pebbles really show up on the reverse.

For binding I pulled out my bin of leftover binding and pieced some together.  Scrappy quilts finish pretty quick when I use the scrappy binding bin.  Binding finished by machine (you can check out my binding tutorial over in tutorials).

Have you done anything really scrappy this year?