Another Low Volume Top started

I am actually making three low-volume tops at the same time from the same fabrics right now.

The first two are called Fat Quarter Flirt, and is made from one of the patterns in a Lori Holt book, Scrappiness is Happiness. It is really simple, and normally I wouldn’t do it, but since my DIL marked it as one of the ones she likes in the book, I decided to go ahead and work on it. It’s easy as it is two large blocks and made up of squares and rectangles that are pretty big. I decided to make it because I wanted to use up some of my favorite fabrics, remember? (It’s a year long goal of mine) and some of these low volume pieces are actually fabrics I love!

Anyway, since choosing the fabrics was the hardest part of this top, I decided to go ahead and make a queen size for us while I was at it. I only needed a fat quarter for each one and Jessica’s took 54 fat quarters and the queen size I’m making takes 44, so that’s a lot of fabric. I cut off 1/2 yard and then made fat quarters.

Big Star, Little Sun

I already cut both of those low volume tops out - as that’s not what this blog post is about, but I had a LOT of leftover smallish pieces due to the sheer number of fabrics used.

So, I decided to go ahead and get working on this quilt - which is my own design.

 

I’m using the fabrics that are in this pile of which I’m cutting into pieces.

Naturally I’m only using the white based prints.

This design needs 12” blocks - and I need 31, I believe, of the ones with nothing in them except low volume fabrics. So, I’m working on cleaning up my ‘mess’ by cutting these pieces into 12.5”, 6.5”, 4.5”, 3.5” and 2.5” squares. I will then make blocks that will be 12.5” unfinished to use as the blocks for this top.

I’ve had this one designed for I don’t know how long. The only difference I’ve made in tweaking it is to allow myself all those different sized backgrounds instead of all the same very large blocks. This is allowing me a much more effective use of leftover pieces.

You can see here that I’ve got some blocks cut out. I stacked them in a single 12.5” pieces stack, then then 4 - 6.5” squares, 9 - 4.5” squares and 12 - 3.5” squares. So, in this group I have the equivalent of about 21 big background blocks.

I still have lots more of those pieces to trim down, however, so I will have plenty to make into the background for the quilt I’ve shown above.

So stick around and I’ll show you where I am with these projects as I finish more.

 

So this one is one I’ve actually finally started, and it feels very good to finally get it going. Because the blocks are so big, it theoretically should go together quickly once I actually start it!. I do like to think about something like this as I cut up scraps, so I can cut some squares the right size (and not just 2.5”, 2” or 1.5”) and make up the half square triangles.

Becky PetersenComment