Geri deGruy's blog of art, musings, and inspiration

I've been in Indiana for 2+ weeks, visiting my sister Les.  I decided to make small quilt hangings while I was there using mostly scraps of fabric.  In fact, one of the pieces is almost entirely out of fabric Les had thrown in the garbage.  Small pieces.  It's amazing what you can make with little scraps.  Raw materials are all over the place.

I ended up making every-other-day quilts because we were busy galavanting around the countryside.  But each one was made in a day.  

Here is the first quilt.

The border is a bit larger than it looks here but my photo didn't catch it.  All the small pieces were from the trash.

There wasn't a plan for this piece.  I simply started sewing rectangles of the scrap fabric together---strip sets.  One piece of the large shape was made by cutting the strip sets into a large triangle while smaller triangles were cut to embellish other pieces of the polygon.  Several rectangles were made the same way.  After cutting the rectangle on the left, I then cut it diagonally and sewed the pieces together. A cut and sew job. 

I cut other triangles out of plain fabrics and then sewed them together into the polygon.  The outer rectangles were attached with double sided fabric adhesive which is ironed on to the piece and then onto the background fabric.

After this I cut a piece of batting to size and a backing fabric to size and pinned them together.  The rest is quilting... inside and around the pieces to give stability and texture and design.

Normally I would sew a separate binding around the piece.  This time I brought the backing fabric onto the front, folded and ironed it, and then stitched it all around.