Scraptasia! (A Cautionary Tale)

This is a cautionary tale of how one small quilt project grew into five quilts plus a couple of pillows.

And all because I couldn't bear to see some scraps go to waste.

It began with this twin quilt.

Quilt #1. (Shown not in kids' guest room but another bedroom.)

 I thought it would be a fun project, one that I could experiment with "big stitch" hand quilting. Maybe it would work for our children's guest room? Yes, it would do fine.

But for some reason I couldn't stop there. Oh, those lovely scraps of "Quilter's Candy Mirage" from Connecting Threads! What to do with them?

Well, there is a toddler bed in the children's guest room, so why not see if I could pull together something for that small bed?

And this little one was born. Yes, it's off center. On purpose. I'm getting more and more fond of wonkiness in quilting. But some in my family find the asymmetry unsettling. Oh well!

Quilt #2

By this time, it was clear I'd need to make a second floating star twin quilt for the upper bunk. What good was there in having two quilts that matched but left the third bed out in the cold?

So I made a second. (Or perhaps I should say "am making." It's pieced, but I'm still quilting it. By now I'm a huge fan of big stitch quilting. It's perfect for a busy, impatient woman!)

Quilt #3: 2nd star quilt in PVC lap quilt frame

Which left another pile of gorgeous scraps.

Which meant one thing: I needed to make another crib quilt. After all, there's a crib in the other guest room next door!

And that's how this starflower quilt came into existence.

Quilt #4 

But still there were scraps! What to do?

Pillows! I'd recently seen Rachel Hauser's beautiful "Ziggy Strings" tutorial and been intrigued.

Wait! I told you there were five quilts, but I've only shown four!

Faith, not to be outdone in the use of scraps, decided to make a quilt for a sweet foster baby using some of the cream scraps plus various other fabrics left from other projects. And here's what she came up with!

Faith's quilt, still in progress (binding not finished); book covers embroidered name.
(Blogger insists on turning this picture sideways!)

I thought we were done there, but all this stash-busting motivated me to actually organize the jumbled boxes of fabric tucked away on my basement shelves, which then led to another quilt... But more on that later!