Monday, June 8, 2026

Banded

Meet Banded! As much as I love them, scrap quilts always feel like a bit of a workout. I personally don't keep my scraps in a very organized (read: neat and pressed) way, so when it's time to work with them, there's always a lot of pressing, trimming (all those strings!), and overall, digging through the scrap basket. But that aside, it feels great to use them!

For this particular quilt, I used up an entire yard of Kona Haze as background on the front. But other than that, every single bit - blocks, backing, and binding - was from the scrap basket.

Speaking of the back, I first made a panel of all the left over bits from the front. Then, without looking, I grabbed a handful of scraps from the scrap basket, pressed them, and sewed them together. And I did it again. There were a few stragglers from each set that made up a fourth panel. I did it once or twice more, then intentionally looked for any larger pieces to start combining the panels together. The photo below shows the shapes of the final pieced slabs that made up the quilt back.


And the finished back!


For quilting, I went with the fast and no-stress serpentine with an off-white thread. Honestly, I was ready to move on. It wasn't lost on me that I'd spent much more time making the quilt back than on quilting, but so be it.


I knew even before quilting that if I wanted to keep the integrity of the quilt front block design, I would not be trimming this quilt 'square.' I'm not sure what happened to make that so, but I was willing to live with it for this particular 'just for fun' quilt.


So in the end, once bound with leftover binding strips straight from the scrap basket, the quilt measured 47" x 55" x 47" x 58". At least it will make a cozy lap quilt!