Scrappy Baby Quilt

I was inspired to learn how to quilt by my Great Grandma Rhoda Lee. She used scraps from dresses and other clothing that was worn out. Her husband, Great Grandpa Edward Lee, made the pattern for her lone star quilts, which she pieced by hand using bias-cut fabric. Then she hand-quilted everything on a quilt frame Great Grandpa Lee made. My version of quilting is salivating over beautiful, usually expensive, fabrics at the local quilt stores, buying a bunch of it, using Quiltsmart or some other simplified method to piece everything together, then sending it to a long-arm quilter to get it all stitched up. In conclusion, I'm kind of a fraud. (To be perfectly honest, though, some of Great Grandma's quilts aren't the prettiest. Someone in her family wore a lot of Pepto Bismol Pink.)

Last month I made a baby quilt with nothing but scraps. I found a piece from one of Sarah Jane's fabric collections, then matched everything to that. The batting was a big piece leftover from another quilt and even the back is a large scrap I decided not to use on something. I quilted it myself (as if you couldn't tell - why would I post a close-up shot of that?) on my machine, then bound it with another large-ish scrap. The only thing I had to buy was a can of spray adhesive (no more safety pins for me!). I'll be able to use that again, but I figure I used about a $1 worth of it. So here's a $1 quilt. 

You can tell I'm not the random-scrappy kind of quilter. So many of my rows ended up lining the same fabrics up. I had to turn things around and try all kinds of combinations before it looked a little random. Can you see how the tree fabric is almost a perfect row?

I'll probably keep it. It was an experiment (especially the quilting) and now I know how long it takes to make it. If I sold it for a reasonable price, I would make about $4 an hour. Ha! There are plenty more scraps where those came from, too. (I got the pattern from a book called Sunday Morning Quilts: Sort, Store, and Use Every Last Bit of Your Treasured Fabrics by Amanda Jean Nyberg and Cheryl Arkison. "Treasured Fabrics" makes me laugh.)