Workin’ on a Scrap Gang....

Do you remember the sixties song “Workin’ on a Chain Gang” by Sam Cooke?? He was so awesome! Listen here or just remember..... you’re welcome for the ear worm.  Anyway, that’s been my theme song while sewing this week. The more we sew - and I sew a lot - the more scraps we seem to accumulate. I also spent lots of time this week (but not nearly enough) outside pulling weeds, working on the Weed Gang. But it’s all good. That is, the sewing is good. The weeds, well, I’m hoping I can bribe some high schooler to come pull weeds for $$$ this summer.

So what did I get done this week on my Scrap Gang Rainbow Scrap Challenge projects? A lot, actually. After finishing Scrap X+plosion last week, I continued working on my quarter log cabins until I was nearly out of multi-colored scraps.

I made 16 blocks. There are no current plans for them; they’ll just reside in the Parts Department until a use comes along. The blocks measure 6.5” each and all have a purple starting square. I have no idea why I picked purple. Anyway, the few scraps that remain were either thrown into the stuffing bag (if they were small) or returned to the scrap basket, which is now an echo chamber of near-nothingness.

And I had so much stuffing in my stuffing bag, (scraps of fabric and batting that would normally go into the trashcan) that I decided to make a couple doggie beds from the pattern by Vickie Welsh. It used all the stuffing that I’ve saved for the last couple months. The fabric is some that I still had in my home dec fabric tub from which I used to make purses and aprons. They rather fit the multi-colored theme this month, don’t they? I guarantee their stuffing contents certainly do! These doggie beds will be added to the cat and small dog quilts I make every month for the Best Friends animal shelter.

And then I made a quick baby quilt from the fabrics left over from a previous baby quilt made a couple years ago. Nothing particularly exciting, but it was fun to get the bits together into some kind of cohesive design.

Another fun part for me was using the quilt to practice quilting free motion flowers. I also did random loops to imitate the bee flight paths shown in the yellow bee fabric.  I can now safely add flowers to my quilting “repertoire”, such as it is.

But there was still more week left....... so I put on my thinking cap and realized I still had a bag of multi-colored scraps left over from my last vintage sheet quilt, Rainbow Rails.  I sorted them out and there were enough multi-colored pastel florals and stripes to make another baby quilt.  So, I cut them into 6” squares and used 42 to make a quilt top.

The picture doesn’t do justice to the soft colors. I was also able to cut out 42 squares of blue-purple-green vintage sheet fabrics for my cousin Kim, who needs to do a quick boy baby quilt.. And, I believe there are enough pink and orange and yellow scraps to get one or possibly even two more baby quilts cut. I`ll deal with those when we get to either one of those colors in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.

Bruce and I went to JoAnn Fabrics this week. He is finally driving again, and it is so nice! I got some sewing machine needles with a 50% off coupon, some American Girl doll clothes patterns (on sale for $1.99 each) to make some more cute doll clothes for my DGD Abbie, and I also bought a cheap poly batt for the donation baby quilt. It was, like $5, so it convinced me that I shouldn’t cut into my good, wide roll of batting.

And then I couldn’t put it off any longer. It was time to get back to my Flower Market quilt and making the borders. I got all the flying geese made and trimmed and there are just enough to make the border around the quilt -  IF I use cornerstones. I checked through my scraps and there were 4 black floral print squares already cut and waiting. Meant to be!

So, I hope to have two quilt finishes this coming week, and then I can start on the cat quilts for the shelter. I’d like to make about eleventy thousand of them; enough to justify another trip to the shelter to unload them and the two doggie beds. Yep, this is life in the fast lane, I tell ya.......

Have a great week!
Linking up to Scrappy Saturday at Angela’s for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.