Quilt as You Go: Easy Scrap Quilt Ideas

Most quilters have an awful lot little scraps around the house, and I'm no different than you if you're a scrap collector too. This is a sweet, cute, really fast little quilt that's made with a lot of little scraps, little odds and ends, little pieces that don't have any matched ones to make a nine patch, or any other kind of a block. So I made this sweet little quilt. The background is also pieced out of scraps, and then the squares or whatever shapes of scraps are placed on the layered quilt, and stitched around. As you stitched to applique it on you're actually doing the quilting too.

So here's what the back looks like with the quilting. You can see it goes all the way through, and that's all the quilting that's in this. So that does help me get a really fast little quilt. A lot of these little pieces of fabric mean something to me. Here's a little piece of something that was my curtains when I was a little kid, kinda funny that I still have it but we quilters do save things a long time.

Some of the pieces have centered items, like here's a little butterfly, pretty center of a flower. Other pieces are just what they were, just cut out of something that doesn't have a particular motif in it. Lot of different sizes and shapes, squares and rectangles mostly, but a few of the pieces have odd edges on them too. The stitching goes inside the edges, and then when you wash it afterwards you've got kind of a nice little frayed, soft edge. Great for little kids and even big people who like soft things like that.

If you like this quilt, and I think it's pretty fun, I'll show you the details on how to make it. The background to this pieced quilt is made of really simple little blocks. The patches are cut three and a half inches by six and a half inches. That's the only patch size you need to know for this. And I made two different blocks.

They might look like they're the same, but they're not. The green and the yellow are swapped on these. And so the blocks are set in vertical rows, I'll make multiples of these and set them in vertical rows, and multiples of this kind of block and set it in vertical rows. The quilt that I showed you earlier is set seven blocks across by six blocks down, and it's 42 inches by 54 inches. You can adjust that size any way you want to.

I chose that size because that's a size that fits a crib quilt real nicely. And that was a good limit to what I could easily sew in my sewing machine when I get to the quilting part. So here's another little quilt that I got started. This one's smaller, this one sits six blocks across, and four blocks down, for 36 by 36 inches. It'd be perfect for a baby quilt.

So the top is pieced and I layered the backing, the batting, and this quilt top, and I basted the layers together with safety pins so it's perfect for sewing in your sewing machine. And then I grabbed some patches to put on here. Some of 'em have little motifs in them, and others are just, print, stripes, whatever. And I just place them on here randomly, keeping in mind that that's how much I'm going to quilt around the edges of each of these patches. So if you leave 'em too far apart you won't have enough quilting in your quilt to really hold it together well.

And this will be a baby quilt someday, so it'll probably be washed a lot. So I want the patches close enough together to make it really secure. I place these anywhere I want to. Sometimes it's fun to put a patch across an intersection. It will make the quilt in the end look a little bit more complex when you don't see all of the seams for the really simple piecing of the blocks in the back.

And that's kinda fun to put some things that in places where they contrast with the background. I'm just gonna place a few on here and I'm going to pin them in place. So if I ever cover up a pin with a patch, I wanna be sure that I take the pin out. Because when you sew around the edges, you don't want a pin stuck, trapped in the middle underneath there. I've actually done that several times, so heed this warning.

So I put the pin on the top now to hold the patch in place. If it's a really big patch I might wanna put in a second pin, but I'm not gonna do that today. So I'll just pin a couple of these on here, and if I don't have a pin right under it I'll just move one that's nearby. I always think stripes and dots are fun to put on here. I think they kinda add to it, and that way you don't have only motifs on here.

You could make this for the larger quilt, it doesn't necessarily have to be little kid things 'cause that 42 by 54 inch quilt is really big enough to be a lap quilt for a teenager or an adult. So I'll just put a few more on here. And like I said I really do like to cover up the intersections, it just kinda makes it a little bit more fun and complex looking. Oh, let's see. Let me put this guy over here.

And I'm turning some of 'em sideways so that there's not necessarily an up and a down to this. I find that quilts wear a little bit better if I don't always have an up and a down to it, so you can turn it any which way and use it and then it'll wear all the way around the edges instead of just on one side. So just a couple more for this, for starters, if you want to you can pin them all on before you even start quilting. Personally I don't usually do that, I like to put on a few and then just get started because sometimes while I'm quilting I'll remember something else, another piece of fabric that I have that I wanna use. So I'm gonna put this little toaster on there too.

I thought that was about the cutest thing I'd seen in a while. I'll pin on a few more of the patches and then I'll get out my sewing machine and show you how you do the rest of it. So I've pinned on several patches in the center of this quilt, and now I'm ready to start quilting it. My machine is set up for free motion quilting. So I put on my darning foot and dropped the feed dogs.

And I also like to set my quilt stitch, my stitch length to zero. The needle just goes up and down and you're guiding the whole quilt top with your hands. But I still like to have the stitch length at zero because that keeps the feed dogs from going up and down, and bothering you while you quilt. The thread that I'm using on the top of the machine will be around all of the patches here. So I've chosen a really lightweight white color.

It's polyester so it's strong enough to hold here but it also will be about as invisible as I can get for a thread that's not monofilament. So as I start, I'm going to take one stitch, and pull the bobbin thread up to the top so I can keep it out of the way. I'm gonna stitch somewhere around an eighth of an inch to a quarter of an inch inside the edges of all the patches. And I also want to try to find a path that's gonna get me around most of the patches that I've pinned on the quilt. That means that I might need to double track over some of the stitching that I've done, and then I'm gonna shoot out across the background to go to another patch and go around it.

It's kinda freeform and I don't worry about it, it's not like this is a quilt that's super fussy, or traditional, or anything. It's just kind of a fun quilt and a great way to start getting really comfortable with free motion quilting. You can start with a bunch of little short stitches, maybe a quarter of an inch of little short stitches which I will do right here. And then you can cut the threads off if you want to, my preference is to leave them long and when I'm all done with my quilting I'll thread those threads into a large eyed needle and then bury them in the batting layer of the quilt, that's just my preference. So here I am goin' around the edges of this first patch.

Trying to do sorta straight lines, but if they aren't straight it kinda doesn't really matter. And I'm gonna come back to where I started so I know I've gone all the way around that particular piece. I definitely am going to check that I took a pin out from underneath those. You don't want any pins under there that get trapped, or that are underneath there and you're gonna break your needle when you hit them. So now I have to figure out which patch I'm gonna go to next.

I think I'll come back across here and up to the orange dot patch. So I'm just going across the background, and I might need to hold that edge of that patch down. I coulda glued it if I'd wanted to, but I didn't. And it looks like now I'm on the edge of the orange patch and I'm going to just go around it. I'm watching where my pins are so I'm sure not to run into them.

And now I'll scoot that pin to the side and do this next edge of the orange patch. If they get a little bit out of shape it doesn't matter because this is going to be a real freeform quilt with raw edges anyway. Good little tuck in that one, and I don't think any little kid who has this quilt is gonna be bothered by a little tuck. And now I'm gonna come across the background again to the toaster. And I missed the edge so I'm gonna back up, get back on it.

I'm hoping you're seeing that this is just pretty free, and easy, and loose, and nothing much to worry about with this. I took that pin out, I'm gonna go around the toaster and when I get to the bottom of that I might just go off to another patch before I've completely gone around the toaster piece. So I'm gonna come across to another patch. This is the only quilting that'll be in this quilt, is what's holding these patches down. So you wanna be sure they're close enough and you're getting enough quilting to really hold this together.

I should take that pin out now because going backwards would be a time I might actually stitch across the pin and break my needle, so I'm gonna get rid of it. Now I'm going across the bottom of this patch, and up, now that I'm part way up this I think I might skip across to this striped piece. You can see I'm just making up this path as I go along. And it doesn't really matter if your stitching isn't an equal distance from the edge of the patches, because when I'm all done with this the quilt will be washed and all of those little edges will be frayed. So some of the edges will come up and hide the stitching, and you won't really be able to tell how far away it is from the edge.

So I'm going all around this patch. Across the top. And I need to get back over to the ladybug one to finish the last side of it that I hadn't completed before. So I've made two trips across the background. Between there, and that works out just fine whatever it takes to do this and as continuously as you can.

And I need to get back up to the toaster patch, and finish going around it. Anytime you want to you can just put on more patches to adjacent areas. I'm leaving this underneath my sewing machine, I can put patches wherever I want to and add them on down below or up above. And there's plenty of room to do that while the quilt is still in your sewing machine. I'm gonna finish going around this one.

Back up to here. And I'm just gonna finish this off. If you sew yourself into a corner or find a place that you wanna stop just go ahead and stop, and then you can start on another patch when you start up again. You can either stop with, when you end your thread you wanna end with about a quarter of an inch of little stitches again, and then either trim off your threads or once again, like I said at the beginning cut long tails of threads and then thread them into the large eyed needle and bury them in the batting layer. So you can see over here that I've gone across the background in a couple of places so you wanna be sure to pick a thread color that is okay with you if it shows.

I probably wouldn't want navy blue on this because I wouldn't like the way that that looked. My stitches are not all exactly the same length, I was just trying to show you how it would be for a beginner doing this, and it's really not a problem. Once this is all washed and the edges fray up it's just a real cute look and people look at the patches rather than the stitches. So that's the last thing you do after you sew on all of the patches, however many you want. You'll bind your quilt, and then you'll wash it, and the edges will fray, and you'll have just a real cute looking quilt.

If you have lots of scraps at your house I think you'll enjoy doing this.