Ten More Charity Tops!

When Ewa has been bringing me the tops her mom makes for us, she often also brings me a bag or two of these. Let me show you.

They are just like the little pieces of fabric sewn onto paper, but wider than the typical paper sewn onto adding machine paper and they are without paper. LOL. I guess they aren’t all that much like that, are they?

These are the small, uneven pieces of fabric that apparently leftover from everything else we’ve done and Ewa gave them to me to “do something with”.

I decided to just make up some row strippy tops - using alternate rows of fabric and these and going lengthwise with the rows.

What I did first was decide to make the first group of quilts using the cooler colored solids that I have.

I tore off 86” lengths of solid royal blue, darker blue, aqua blue, light blue, grass green, lighter green, and lavender and then purple. Those are the fabrics I have in this “cool” range. I also have a sage green, but I didn’t want to use it with this group. I then just used my walking foot and after tearing off a width from between 4” and 8”, I sewed a row of those strips to this narrow strip of colorful fabric.

(I did have to press those long rows of strips first as they had hadn’t been pressed. This way, I could get the seams all going the same way and when sewing, just sew them with the seams going “down”.) I sewed these strips to each side of that piece of fabric which was about 5” or 6” or more” wide x 86” long. I did that over and over.

Then I chose one piece of strips/color/strips and pinned a piece of fabric of another color to the strips side of one of them and sewed it. I repeated that over until I had a top that was pretty close to 60’” wide by 86” long. I made several of them until I ran out of solid colored strips. (I am NOT out of solids - but just out of the one piece that I was using from each color.)

There is no real rhyme or reason to the color arrangement in the top - it was whatever I hadn’t already used as I only wanted to use each color once in the top.

I also decided I liked it better when I started and stopped with the solid color - and I know that a scrappy binding will be wonderful against the solid as opposed to the strips.

HOWEVER, as I look at the photos as I write this blog post, I’m not so sure that I like the ones with the solids along the edges better. I do think the scrappy binding would show up better with them, but I do like the other style - and I’d use up the strips a little faster. :)

These all the first ten with the cool color solids as the alternate rows.

I also hope to make a group with pinks and purples and maybe add the light blue.

Then I’ll do a group with black, gray and red as the solids. Ewa has given me so many of these strips and I’ve not used them much to this point. I don’t think I realized how many I have!

Each one of these tops still takes me maybe an hour or so to put together - maybe less. I might try it on the Juki - without the walking foot, as it sews faster than the Janome to see how it goes. If I use the walking foot, I do have more confidence, however. But the Juki goes up to 5000 stitches per minute and not 1800. :) Truthfully, 5000 is faster than I can really control…but I don’t mind going faster than 1800 on such a thing as it is a very long, straight line of stitching!

I think, however, that I’ve used up only one of the 5 bags of these types of strips I currently have. I am consolidating as I work with them, but Ewa has given me a LOT! Someone spent a lot of time sewing these together and I did want to make sure I get them made into tops. I’m not sure if it is Ewa or her mom who has done the sewing, but I suspect the strips are a joint effort between the two!

I’m not showing all ten because they are all quite similar and don’t want to bore you with 10 tops almost the same!!

I do think that I will prepare another bag and take these tops to the church where they can wait until I’m ready to quilt them.

The alternative is to take them downstairs and put them in my long arm room, but I think I won’t. While my room at the church is full of quilts waiting for the give-away, I do have it designated as my “storage room” for this kind of thing, so I might as well use it for that.

The idea I am thinking of here is something like this one that I made with crumbs. The difference with this one is that there was a much higher ratio of color to the crumbs. I also threw in black, which I am not doing with these.

Also this quilt shown on the right is done with the rows going sideways.

So there you go. I’m actually thinking of quilting these with some straight line quilting when it is time to quilt them. We’ll see. I’m still thinking about it.

Thanks so much for coming along with me on this journey!

Have a great day wherever you are reading this!

Becky Petersen6 Comments