Scrubbie Quilts

It finally feels like Fall! It’s my favorite season and I love visiting the pumpkin farm and setting out the Autumn decorations. I hope you won’t mind my sharing a photo each week 😊, like this one of Autumn on our deck:

And now for “Scrubbie Quilts”: As a little background information for my piece ~ our big challenge this year will be a triptych: three finished quilts hung together from one sleeve. There’s more to that challenge to be shared in a future post, but this idea inspired me to try a triptych on a smaller scale ~ and incorporate the scrubbie.

But not all. Choosing which scrubbie was the easy part ~ what to do with it wasn’t quite so easy.

I began by selecting some of my rust dyed fabric (click here for that post) and a lovely blue fabric that went well with it. I cut out three rectangles of gradated size, and decided to fuse strips of the opposite fabric in a pleasing arrangement using the “Parallelisms” technique from my book Where Do I Start With Fiber Art? (click here to read about my book)

Nice, but it needed more. Would contrasting “diamonds” work?

Yes! Now what to do with the scrubbie? I tried pulling strands of the copper metal out and braiding them, but that was not fun or easy. Then I unrolled the scrubbie and was enthralled by the weaving of the strands. Perhaps I could flatten it (a fete in itself) and capture a piece inside each “diamond”:

Ooh – that worked! I actually had to make each diamond separately ~ from background, scrubbie and “frame” ~ then square that unit up and appliqué it to the main background with a blind hem stitch.

I soon discovered using rust dyed fabric and metal mesh (which all tend to be be hard on blades, thread and needles), proved to be difficult. After squaring up each diamond with my rotary cutter ~ the blade was shot (it was time to change it anyways). I don’t mind that task any more because I use Magna-Dots™:

For my step-by-step blade changing post with the wooden Magna-Dots™ please click here. The link to order magna dots has changed since that post. Click here for Cynthia’s site.

Once the blade was changed and the “diamonds” were in place, it was time to determine how to quilt each panel. I like to cover the piece with Glad Press and Seal™ and experiment with different designs by drawing with washable markers.

Once those decisions were made, I layered the sandwiches with a thin batt and pinned with straight pins because each panel was small.

As I stitched my chosen design I had to deal with a few issues due to quilting through the rust. I persevered and my three quilts were finished. It was time for binding. Simple seemed best, so I bound them all with a narrow blue binding and I’m very pleased with the results.

Any thoughts on what I should name it?

I recently showed this quilt to Sommer and Trey. I explained that the quilts got progressively smaller, and the number of skinny strips changed too. Then Trey said “yeah, and the strips got smaller in multiples of three”. Sometimes 8 years olds can really amaze us 😁!

And, to see all the amazing ThreadBender’s Scrubbie Quilts, click here! Thanks ThreadBenders, for another fun learning experience.