Scrappy Fun

Saturday morning is a great time for me to play if I am not in the middle of another project. This Saturday I decided to play with scraps and make scrappy crazy blocks.  Victoria Findlay Wolfe (BumbleBeans)  calls this "made fabric"  and she has written a book about it.  However, I do it my way and just use the made fabric as whole blocks.  I laid the two blocks on a piece of black foamcore board for the photo and some of the dark fabric just almost blends into the background.

These two blocks are each 12 1/2" square.  I used many of the same scrap fabrics in each one. This will make them work well together in a quilt. Although if you use enough different fabrics in a scrap quilt nothing really has to match.  It is important to watch values.  Some of my values in this are a bit too close. Let me show you what happened when I removed the colors and left only values.

In the left hand block, the gold/yellow at the bottom is the same value as the red that attaches at the upper edge.  In the right hand block at the bottom, the royal blue and the green are almost the same value also. Luckily the blue is mottled and you can see a slight variation. If I had taken pictures of my scraps to check values (or used a value viewer - which would probably be easier) then I would have used more darks and lights to break up the values.

So what does this mean for you?  A strong contrast in color values can make your quilts really POP and catch the eye of the viewer.  This is very important if you are entering a quilt show.  The judges will be seeing lots of quilts and the ones that make an impact generally win.

After saying all that, I still love the blocks as they are.


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