Scrapper's Delight in Shades of Spring

In my previous post, The Easter Quilt: Welcoming Spring, I shared my struggles with negative space in making my frolicking-bunnies Easter quilt. I medicated my anxiety by making a scrappy backing using the same spring-pastel color scheme of pinks, light blues, pale green, and other tints. The pattern, called "Scrapper's Delight," comes from the book Sunday Morning Quilts by Amanda Jean Nyberg and Cheryl Arkison.

The source: Sunday Morning Quilts

I began with this playful pile of scraps:

It was an absolute joy to watch the pile dwindle, find more scraps to use up, watch those dwindle, and find more scraps, and... you get the picture. This pattern uses up a lot of scraps!

The pattern is constructed of scrappy concentric squares built in fourths. Here is the first quarter-square:

And here is the first full square block:

If you are using this very fun pattern, I have two tips:

1) arrange the scraps in piles by length.

2) work on more than one quarter-square block at a time.

I found that I was able to complete blocks much more quickly by working on four at a time. With my scraps sorted by length, I would work through the short pieces, then the medium ones, then the longer ones. I felt a great sense of accomplishment as I finished the quarter-square blocks in quick succession and then joined them together into the full-square block.

For the quilting, I chose spiraling squares and rectangles. Straight line quilting is not my forte, and I learned some lessons in this process.

1) Read the manual! In February I purchased a Janome 6600, which is a wonderful machine. On this wonderful machine, I had

Janome even feed foot: no dogs here -
they're on the machine

previously tried using my walking foot with no success. Why? Because unlike on the Brother machine I had been using before that, on the Janome 6600 the upper feed dogs are attached to the machine, not the presser foot. On various occasions, this one included, I tried to use the walking foot with no luck at all. The fabric wasn't even moving. After consulting the manual I learned that I needed to engage the upper set of feed-dogs that were already on my machine after attaching the foot. From that moment, it walked like a dream.

Janome Acufeed Quilting Guide Bar

2) Quilting guides are designed to be used on the right side of the presser foot, with the prong facing up. If you use it on the left, which I did, the prong faces down. If you are quilting a string pieced quilt, which I was, that prong will get stuck in your seams. In this case, I didn't want to mark the quilting lines because I wanted to improvisationally vary the width between lines, but I also wanted straight, parallel lines. I thought I would use the quilting guide to keep my lines parallel. Unfortunately, I was spiralling the "wrong" way, and positioned the guide bar on the left. The prong kept getting stuck in the seams and before long the tab that held the guide bar in place behind the presser foot became so loose from all the pulling that the guide no longer stayed in place. Oops.

Hera marking tool in action

3) The Hera marking tool is amazing! I bought this tool a few months ago and never used it. My quilting guide bar fail sent me scurrying for other solutions. I read a wonderful tutorial on straight line quilting by one of my quilting crushes, Nicole Neblett of MamaLoveQuilts. She emphasized the importance of marking and recommended the Hera marking tool. I pulled mine out of the drawer and was amazed at how well it worked.

So, one of the great values of this project is that I *began* to clean up my technique and learned how to use some new tools for straight line quilting.

The last step before binding was to square the quilt:

For binding, I chose a tie-dyed fabric in pale blue, pink, and purple to pull together the many happy tints used on both sides of the quilt. And by the time I finished my scrappy backing, I had decided that the back was now the front. Whoever adopts the frolicking bunnies may disagree, but for now, here is the new front of my Scrapper's Delight / Frolicking Bunnies Easter Quilt. It makes me very happy. I'd love to hear about the projects you've undertaken to celebrate Spring!