New Scrap Quilt ~ Red and Green

 A year or so ago I had a great plan to make a red and green quilt.  As you can see I didn't get very far before pushing her aside for the next big quilt plan.  Tis the season to start a huge Christmas quilt plan with hopes of having it finished in time for Christmas.  What's a holiday season without one or two unnecessary expectations!

Over the last year I've been building a scrap saver system, so that seems like a good place to start looking for more fabrics.  As you can see, there's not much in the scrap saver system that will work in this quilt.  Just a few greens in both the squares and the strips, no low volume backgrounds.  The basket with the green and red fabric might be enough to get the quilt top made, if not I can always go to my large red and green scrap bin for more.

It was time to dig through the bin of low volume prints that are less than 2.5 inches wide.

Well poo!  My quilt will be over 90" square.  This isn't going to be enough background fabric and I know the other low volume bin with larger cuts doesn't have the prefered style of prints.

So it was time to pull out the extra large tote of shame.  This tote is solid whites, white on whites, creams and cream on cream.  I've been adding to it for about 15 years with very little ever being used.

 The first thing I found was this bag of hundreds of 2.5" solid white unstarched squares.  I would have preferred they be white on white and starched but this will work.  The plan is a quick and easy scraps quilt.  Using what I have will keep it quick and easy and it gets me out of a comfort zone.

It didn't take much longer before realizing more space was needed to sort this tote of fabric.  So I took the sort down to the floor.  After an hour of sitting on the cold tile floor a break was needed to warm up my tooshy.

Then it was back to the cold floor for another hour of sorting.  There's more than enough white on white fabric for this quilt.  

It gave me a chuckle to see the little specks of itty bitty colorful prints hiding in the huge tote of whites.  Y'all know I have a hard time trashing little bits of fabric.  It was hard to let the pretty little ones go but I sticking to my rule put in place earlier in the year ...  I can only save it if I can cut a one inch square.

Thankfully I had tucked away  some larger pieces of white on white fabric in this tote.  The larger scraps will make the piecing go faster. So I'll be using the larger pieces first. The rest of the white on white will be stored in a smaller project tote just incase they are needed later.

Some of these prints are from 15 years ago.   And they are not quilt shop quality.  More than likely they came from Joann Fabrics.  They also are from the time in my quilting journey when I didn't starch my fabric, so they got a good starching and pressing before the cutting began.

To start out my day of sewing I cut just enough to go with the few green squares I found in the scrap saver system and the squares that were hiding the basket of fabric I shared earlier in this post.

Before I knew it they were all sewn and pressed.  A few of them were pulled and will not be added to this quilt.  They will find their new home in the orphan block tote.  They look a little too blue for this quilt.  Then it was time to start counting.  I had more than expected, over half of what is needed for the quilt.

At this point you're probably wonder what's the quilt pattern?  Christmas Garland by Wendy Sheppard.  It was on the cover of Quilters World Magazine, Winter 2025.

I'll be honest, this quilt isn't one of those that I saw and thought it was a must make.  It's one that looked like a good way to use up a lot of little scraps and it's easy piecing.  It should go together quickly with strip piecing most of the units.  

For now she's being set aside so I can work on a few other things.  

First up will be the Yo-Yo coverlet.

I finished the last of the yellow yo - yo's.

This week I'll be cutting green circles from the scrap bins.  I found four green ones already made.  I don't remember making them but obviously I did.  That's 466 yo-yo's made so far.  759 more are needed from the scrap bins.

After making 759 more from the scrap bins, I'll still need 800 more white and green for the borders.  I'm 13 months into the 2 year plan for this coverlet.  My thought was one year to make the yo-yo's and one year to sew them into a coverlet....sigh....a 3 year plan is looking pretty good right now...HAHA!