Looking back

As I was finishing the circus strip, I snapped a pic of the lay-out and sent it off to my quilting partner-in-crime, Emily.  I was ridiculously excited about my progress and I hoped she would be impressed as she is a much more competent sewer than I.

She came back with suitably supportive exclamations and then asked about what I was thinking for doing about the back.

That stopped me cold.  I had no idea.

As I spoke about last week, up until that point I hadn’t really thought about the rest of the quilt, or even the quilt as a whole.  I was just going piece by piece.

That was when it occurred to me to try and make the back out of the t-shirt scraps.  Emily thought it was a great idea.  To begin, I went through my scrap bag (I have a scrap bag.  Am I a quilter or what?) which is just a large Ziploc.

I pulled out anything I thought had enough square area to be useful and then started trimming.

I started with the smaller pieces, creating a lot of strips of various sizes and then moved on to bigger blocks of various sizes.  These were mostly remnants of shirts from the first two sections as they were already cut out.  Finally, I moved onto the remnants of the circus shirts which were mostly almost whole pieces.  I left a bunch of large pieces and then salvaged every little scrap I could.

However, I left one shirt untouched.  I can’t say why.  I also left the sleeves of each shirt intact.  Again, I can’t speak to the decision making process.

When done, I had quite a variety.  Admittedly mostly of the circus shirt pieces, which to be honest aren’t a great colour palette, but what’re going to do, eh?


At this point I realized I had no idea how large the back needed to be or how I would lay it out.
Unlike the front sections, this was one entity.  All these scraps were going to go together in one large piece as opposed to working in serendipitous sections.  I froze a bit, unsure where to start.

Despite this hesitation, I didn’t want to stop my serendipitous style of piecing by resorting to measurements and math, so I laid out the top pieces as neatly as possible on the living room floor.  I then used drafting tape to mark the corners and edges.  I now had a permanent ‘pattern’ on the floor to shape the back.

I started with the big blocks in the corners and attempted to lay out smaller ones in the left over spaces.  I wasn’t feeling it.  Nothing seemed to be quite fitting right.  Not the colours, not the shapes, I wasn’t happy.

So instead, as with every other section thus far, I decided to just start piecing together scraps as I found them.  I ended up with three ‘scrapy’ blocks I was really happy with and just kept going.

In the next eight hours I went through three bobbins and two spools of thread.  I finally stopped when I sewed two pieces together back to front and my final bobbin ran out.  It seemed  a sign that I had become a bit too feverish in my piecing and it was time to take a step back and look at what I had to work with now.

The blocks seemed to be taking on a vertical orientation and all about a third of the width of the quilt.  It looked like my pattern had again been decided for me.


Join me next week for a lesson learned...