Using up the left overs

As I mentioned in my last post, I was going to show you what my quilting bee friend Carol did with her left over fabric, from making the lap size log cabin.  She made two table toppers or you could also consider them to be wheelchair quilts.

Here is the first one.  This is a very simple quilt that looks a bit complicated and a nice use of small leftover pieces.  If you look very closely you will notice that this quilt is basically made up of a set of two strips.  One in the coloured fabric and one in the white.  It is laid out like a rail fence pattern.  The only difference here is that she would have laid the quilt on the design wall/floor to put her colours in groups of four. Or you could make the large block using the four sets of strips in the same colour and lay them out as blocks, distributing the colours across the quilt.

This next one is very nice too!  I could really see this in a queen sized quilt made up in masculine colours for a modern looking quilt for the guy in your life.  This is also a very easy quilt to assemble. Carol would have used her leftover strips from making the log cabin quilt, but you can use up some of your fat quarters or those strips you are saving from the Bonnie's scrap users system.  The layout is again the same as a rail fence pattern.  Just make your blocks what ever size you want and twist every second block to the left.

If you do like Carol did and place your darkest colour (or that wow fabric) on the edge, you will create a zig zag step effect all across the quilt.  Again Carol used white between the colours, which is very pretty and soft looking, but you could use any colour.

And here I thought to add in the original log cabin quilt, so that you can compare colours and see just how different a quilt can look, even when using the same fabrics.  Three different quilts and all of them have a completely different feel to them.  Just beautiful.  Nice job Carol!

I am a fan of Bonnie Hunter as most of you have probably noticed by now.  I truly love her methods of using what you have, scrap quilts and her scrap user system.  Especially her scrap users system.  After I finish a project and trim it up, I will cut up the left overs to add them to my scrap users system, but......next time I do finish a quilt, I think I will see if I might want to make another quilt using the left overs instead.